On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 17:24, John Jason Jordan <joh...@comcast.net> wrote: > They all reported nothing, except "unhide sys" found a long list of > hidden processes. "Aha!" I thought. So I checked them with top (maximum > 20 at a time). All looked perfectly normal and only two or three were > consuming any CPU% at all, and they were taking only 1-3%. The only > oddity was that several had more than one instance of the process > running, and one (console-kit-dae) had around 60 instances running. But > none of them were taking any CPU or RAM.
I believe in an earlier email you suggested that you experimented a little with powertop but did not specify whether you understood any of its output; it might be time to revisit the program. Beyond a 'top'-like interface, powertop can show a summary of data collected over a period of time with the '-d' option. You should be able to get a list of processes that are waking up the CPU most often, what percentage of the time the CPU is at each frequency and the percentage the CPU is in a given state. While a program might not be using 100% of the CPU, it might be interrupting the CPU often enough to prevent it from sleeping. Try running powertop for a full 60 seconds with the following command: $ powertop -d -t 60 Information about processor states can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface#Processor_states Here's a partial dump from my laptop: Collecting data for 15 seconds Cn Avg residency C0 (cpu running) ( 3.7%) polling 0.0ms ( 0.0%) C1 mwait 0.0ms ( 0.0%) C2 mwait 0.3ms ( 0.9%) C4 mwait 3.2ms (95.4%) P-states (frequencies) 2.51 Ghz 0.1% 2.50 Ghz 0.0% 2.00 Ghz 0.0% 1.60 Ghz 0.0% 800 Mhz 99.9% Wakeups-from-idle per second : 330.7 interval: 15.0s no ACPI power usage estimate available Top causes for wakeups: 32.0% (127.8) <kernel core> : hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) 26.6% (106.2) npviewer.bin : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup) 13.2% ( 52.7) <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt ... In the above example, the npviewer.bin (a wrapper around the flash plugin) is a major offender; It's only consuming 2-3% of CPU but it's responsible for 26% of wakeups. What's nice is that it also break out which parts of the kernel are waking up the CPU which top/'gnome system monitor' doesn't seem to do. If you're not sure what your results mean, feel free to paste it back to the list. If powertop really has nothing useful then, as others have started to question, it might be hardware and/or fan control. Cheers, Daniel Hedlund dan...@digitree.org _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
