Re: High CPU load from image slideshow screensaver



Hi,

On 5/28/07, Adam Rosi-Kessel <adam rosi-kessel org> 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. Although it's an older laptop, I
would hope it wouldn't be viewed as totally obsolete: it's a Pentium III
700 MHz with 512M RAM.

The only way I can get music to play smoothly while the screensaver is
on is to renice -1 the music task and +20 the screensaver task.

Is there some reason the photo slideshow is so CPU intensive? At first I
thought it was because it was resizing the images to fit the screen, but
after converting all the images in my image directory to 1024x768 (the
LCD resolution), the result is identical.

Can anyone suggest a workaround for this? It doesn't seem like too much
to ask for to be able to play normal bitrate MP3s and have the
screensaver on at the same time.

I'm sorry to hear it.

We haven't really done a lot of profiling and performance tuning on
this.  The last attempt was in:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339090

In fact, way back I even asked Rodrigo to blog a request for tuning help:
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/rodrigo/2005/08/04/0

I've been meaning to put together a test set to post to the cairo
list.  I just haven't had the time.  It would be great if a volunteer
would help out.

Probably the first step is to run the slideshow engine outside of
gnome-screensaver and see what you get.  The executable name is just
"slideshow" and usually lives in libexec.

Bug #339090 should show some techniques for profiling the code that
may be helpful.

You can open a new bug in gnome bugzilla if you like - and please note
the versions of gnome-screensaver, cairo and your graphics driver.

The workaround to be able to listen to your music, of course, is to
pick a less intensive screensaver theme.

Thanks,
Jon



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