GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 571357
System Monitor graph update frequency 10x too fast
Last modified: 2011-11-11 10:03:55 UTC
Please describe the problem: There appears to be a dropped decimal place in the System Monitor application. By default it appears to update its Resources graphs 10 times/second (putting a significant load on my Atom desktop). System Monitor Preferences for Graphs lists an "Update interval in seconds", which has a default value of 1.0. However, this dialogue must be set at 10.00 in order for the graph updates to slow down to 1/sec. Steps to reproduce: Click on Applications/System Tools/System Monitor An application with title bar "System Monitor" comes up. Help/About for that application displays "System Monitor 2.24.1" View current processes and monitor system state ps -ef suggests that this application is called "gnome-system-monitor" I've verified that this problem exists in both 32-bit FC10 and 64-bit FC9. Actual results: CPU consumption goes up to the roof Expected results: long-running process should behave sanely Does this happen every time? yes, after some time, unless frequency is fixed accordingly Other information:
There's a difference between the frame rate and the data refresh rate. The dialog is correct. However the cpu usage you get is not. Please check: - with the latest stable release of system-monitor - have a look in top about cpu usage of both system-monitor and X - which X driver are you using ?
System Monitor Preferences/Resources/Graphs Update interval in seconds: 1.0 gives me a graph that updates about about 10 times a second. I'm baffled how the word "correct" can possibly here... Help on the application now identifies it as version 2.24.3. I don't know how to check the latest stable release of system-monitor, if you tell me how, I'll do it. Top say that gnome-system-mo is staking about 28% and Xorg is taking 23% of CPU. When I change the dialogue above to be 10.0 seconds (so that the display updates once/second) Xorg consumes 4.3% and gnome-system-mo consumes 3.3% If you tell me how to identify what X driver I'm using, I'll be happy to do so, though it seems far fetched that an update interval that is 10x faster than requested could be caused by the underlying driver. I'm running with the kernel and user-space from Fedora 10. yum update tells me that there are no additional updates.
Apparently nobody cares about this problem. # rpm -e gnome-system-monitor has made this problem go away for me.
Again: the frame rate is not the same than the data refresh rate. You can choose the data refresh rate, but the frame rate is higher so __you__ won't complain about the graph jumping on each refresh. About the performance: i'm sorry but the only thing to blame is your driver. I haven't looked further into that problem (being able to debug/profile X is not a common skill) because on my hardware (free radeon driver, binary NVIDIA driver), X CPU usage is always < 5%, even on a 500MHz laptop. Maybe there also something about cairo, but i can't see how to improve it. Cairo was sold as the perfect drawing engine, but it seems to me that average code + bad drivers + bad X configuration makes impossible to sustain 10fps. Maybe a sysprof profile would help. Len > Thanks Intel for their great support.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!