GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 565149
System Monitor lacks is inefficient
Last modified: 2013-08-03 22:12:20 UTC
Please describe the problem: There are two problems with System Monitor: 1) One cannot shrink the Column Titles. 2) CPU usage is excessive. Steps to reproduce: 1. Double click on the Gnome Panel CPU/MEM/NET/DISK monitor launching System Monitor 2.24.1. 2. Sort on CPU by clicking on the %CPU column. 3. Notice that "gnome-system-monitor" is consuming 9+% of the CPU. 4. Add "wide" columns to the display (e.g. "Virtual Memory" or "Resident Memory" and attempt to "shrink them" using header "column" divider sizing arrows -- they no longer will size to less than the column header width (they used to do so). This is problematic for columns much wider than the data being displayed. Actual results: 1) CPU usage of gnome-system-monitor is too high. (Typical uses are for high memory usage or high CPU usage tracking -- track those first from refresh to refresh.) and ignore low usage processes. On a system with many processes displaying everything consumes excessive processes -- Modify the "View" options to include those highest in specific (common) high-usage areas -- then select and monitor those with a perspective for minimal CPU usage. Expected results: System monitoring should not place an excessive load on the system. So one should expect to set to be able set "typical" things one is concerned with (e.g. CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O usage, etc.), this means more "View" options to allow one to tune processes which are monitored (and decrease CPU usage by monitoring important processes and ignoring low overhead processes). Does this happen every time? Yes. It is a flaw in the architecture of looking at "all" processes rather than just selected processes which are having an impact on system performance. Other information: The header "width" problem could be resolved by having "short forms" of the long form headers. For example, when one shrinks "Virtual Memory" (shrinking 14 characters to generally 9 characters (e.g. 297.7 MiB), then one option would be replacing the full text header "Virtual Memory" with a short form, e.g. "VM". However in all cases it should be possible to size the various columns to an size one desires and it it up to the program whether to truncate from the right or the left or encode shorter forms.
[Adding missing "QA Contact" entry so system monitor bug report changes can still be watched via the "Users to watch" list on https://bugzilla.gnome.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email when the assignee is changed to an individual.]
Created attachment 237277 [details] KDE System Monitor is a lot more CPU efficient Actually it should not "see" just the most important processes, but ALL. And this is not the cause it consumes this much resources because other programs do it a lot better: see the python app Xubuntu comes with, see KDE's System Monitor (ksysguard). I installed ksysguard yesterday and I see by default all processes (in gnome-system-monitor I think that I see only current user's processes by default) and it still eats 1% of my processor (very rarely 2%, for short periods of time, if I do some sorting). Don't believe me? See this screenshot:
My last post refers to Gnome System Monitor 3.6, so please don't say it is an old bug report, the bug is still there.
Point 1. of the descirption (columns can not be shrinked) seems to be fixed in the latest release, and as the high CPU usage of the process list is discussed and handled in bug #524830, I am marking this a duplicate of that ticket. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 524830 ***