Top wakeups causers

[Aaron Baff]

On 5/14/07, Adam Jackson <ajackson at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 17:30 +0300, Aaron Baff wrote:
>
> > And below all of those is Xorg, which seems to be split between
> > do_setitimer (it_real_fn) and nv_start_rc_timer (nv_kern_rc_timer)
> > functions.
>
> This is going to come up a lot, so, let's get this one out of the way.
>
> X uses setitimer() when it's actively servicing requests from clients.
> It schedules an alarm for ~20ms in the future so that it can know when a
> significant amount of time has elapsed, and therefore schedule other
> clients if they're ready.  So at worst, it'd wake up 50 times a second,
> but it'll only do so when it's already busy doing work.
>
> Getting better accounting information out of X is definitely a goal, but
> right now no one's working on it.  Until then you have to work backwards
> from the other wakeup events to figure out what's waking up your X
> server.
>
> - ajax
>
>

Hmm...this sounds like it has something to do with either
Enlightenment17 or the binary NVidia drivers I have. E17 has some
nifty features which let you have a background that actually morphes
(basically a mini graphics program). However when I turn it off and
just use a static background the setitimer() usage does drop quite a
bit so it may not be that.

My other thought is that its the NVidia drivers. Perhaps those
requires some care taking every so often no matter what which means
Xorg has to do that every so often. Its an interesting thought. Anyone
who can actually talk to one of the engineers over there want to try
and get in touch with them? I'll try the OSS nv driver sometime in the
next day or so if I can get the time and see if that makes a
difference.

Aaron