Oh, actually, it was doing 10 accesses in 300 seconds, so it's polling every 30 seconds, higher than I first thought.
** Summary changed: - gnome-calendar opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/* every 60 seconds + gnome-calendar opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/* every 30 seconds ** Changed in: gnome-calendar (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided => High -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-calendar in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846768 Title: gnome-calendar opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/* every 30 seconds Status in gnome-calendar package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: I've been trying to figure out why my HDD keeps on flushing metadata out every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gnome-calendar opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my machine every minute. This causes the access time (atime) to be updated causing a metadata flush afterwards. On an idle laptop this makes the HDD spin up, write data and then spin down again. This consumes power. Can this periodic open/closing be fixed or at least try to use O_NOATIME on the opening to reduce the metadata atime updates? I diagnosed this by running: sudo fnotifystat -v -x/sys,/proc,/home one can see that the gnome-calendar is opening and closing the file. Looking deeper, I used health-check on gnome-calendar to gather the attached activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gnome-calendar on the idle machine. One can see it sleeps for ~60 seconds on a poll() system call and every 60 seconds opens and closes the zoneinfo file. To capture the activity I used: sudo health-check -p gnome-calendar -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-calendar- 5min.log I'm pretty sure that opening the zoneinfo file with O_NOATIME will avoid the metadata atime flushes and because the data has not changed on disk it should avoid the HDD spinup/spindown cycling. Alternatively, can the zoneinfo reads be avoided totally every 60 seconds to save power? To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-calendar/+bug/1846768/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
