panel plugins that cause too many wakeups/s

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Tino Keitel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I noticed at some point that the Xfce panel produces a fair number of
> wakeups/s. So I always kill it when running on battery, and I can see
> that this gains some battery runtime.
> 
> I tried to find out what specific panel component is responsible for
> this. Conclusion: the most wakeups/s are caused by the system load
> plugin. Here are some numbers:
> 
> system load plugin: 11

I tried to fix the system load plugin a few months ago by decreasing the 
update interval, but even with the interval set to several seconds, I 
was still seeing several wakeups per second, and could never figure out 
why.  I had the same issue with the netload plugin.

> battery monitor plugin: 3

I believe the current released battery plugin polls for battery status, 
so there's not much you can do except increase the interval.  The 
version in Nick's "hal_based" branch in SVN works very well, and doesn't 
poll, but instead uses HAL which does async notification of changes. 
I've been using it for many months now without problems, and I never see 
it show up in powertop at all.

> Without the above plugins, an idle desktop causes less than 7
> wakeups/s. This is with a running panel with the weather, clock, and
> sensors plugin running (and a few other plugins with static content,
> like the pager, task list, menu, dict, quit button and some launchers).
> The sensors plugin update interval is 60 seconds.

Heh, I can't get my laptop under 200 wakeups per second or so, but 
that's probably just ppc kernel issues and too many (hopefully) useless 
interrupts...  And firefox.

> I think that the affected plugins should be optimized, so that running
> them on battery power doesn't cause noticable decreasement in battery
> runtime.

You volunteering?  Cool!

> I'm aware of the current 4.6 development status, so I'd like to know if
> some of the issues are already fixed.

Most plugins are developed under the umbrella of the 'goodies' project 
and thus aren't tied to the 4.6 development process at all.

> battery monitor plugin:
> 
> Wakeups-from-idle per second :  9.6     interval: 30.0s
> Power usage (ACPI estimate): 9.8W (7.2 hours) (long term: 10.1W,/6.9h)
> 
> Top causes for wakeups:
>   45.1% (  4.6)       <interrupt> : acpi
>    9.8% (  1.0)          noflushd : do_nanosleep (hrtimer_wakeup)
>    9.8% (  1.0)              Xorg : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)

I'm not seeing the battery plugin in there ^_~

	-b