Re: High CPU load from image slideshow screensaver

[Adam Rosi-Kessel <adam rosi-kessel org>]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 09:25:20AM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
> > The image slideshow screensaver in gnome-screensaver puts such a load on
> > my laptop's CPU that the fan runs constantly and tasks such as music
> > playing with totem become very choppy. 
> As far as I know the image slideshow is an f-spot thing so you should
> really ask the f-spot developers. desktop-devel-list seems inappropriate
> for this kind of questions.

f-spot isn't even installed on this machine. Are we talking about the
same feature?

<http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/debug/2007/05/29/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver.png>

It seems like the image slideshow is part of the gnome-screensaver
package, at least in Debian. The engine is
/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver/slideshow.

f-spot seems to have its own, separate screensaver which, when installed,
is /usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver/f-spot-screensaver. I'm
not using that one.

If this indeed is not a gnome-screensaver issue, though, where would I go
since it's not f-spot? I also tried to find a more appropriate gnome
list, but the only other possibility I could find was screensaver-list,
which seems dead.  

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:38:21PM -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> Have you checked if there's no other task running while the
> screensaver is? I say this because maybe some app you are running
> checks for idle time and starts some process.

I'm pretty sure nothing else is running in the background. No google
desktop or other indexing feature, no SETI, etc.. top/ps via ssh don't
show any other unusual activity. The only tasks that are using
appreciable CPU when the system is idle are
/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver/slideshow and /usr/bin/X
(together they get up into 20-30% of CPU when the screensaver is running,
taking ps snapshots every 15 seconds).  

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 09:28:09AM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> maybe I'm dumb but I never managed to make that screensaver work. All I
> get is a black screen, and there's nowhere to set where too look for
> pictures, and DnD doesn't work.
> Is there something wrong on my system (debian/sid) ?

I believe it is hard-coded to search ~/Pictures.

Thanks for any further suggestions.

Adam