performance problems?

[Thomas List <Thomas.List-vA1bhqPz9FBZXbeN9DUtxg@public.gmane.org>]

Hi all,

I'm working on a small battery applet for my laptop that reads out the 
battery status. As I have up to now no better idea I'm pulling the 
battery status (/proc/acpi/battery/...) every few seconds (anyone an 
idea of how to do this better?). Now a battery applet should consume as 
few CPU cycles as possible to not use up the battery itself. So I'm 
trying to monitor how much computing time my applet is using. For the 
moment I'm doing this using top (I know this is not perfect for that 
task ...). Now to the problem:

After the laptop is running for some time the CPU% value in top is 
getting higher and higher. It starts with around 0.3% in the beginning, 
after one hour it reaches 1,5% and I had it up to 3% and more after a 
longer time. I am quite sure this is not my applet - I can stop the 
program and restart it and still get the higher values. I tried to watch 
a video in this state and while my program was running I had short stops 
in the video play back that match the 2 seconds interval of pulling the 
battery status. Without my program running the stops disappeared.
Using a file system copy of /proc/acpi my program does not show at all 
on the top list.

I am using acpi 20021111 on a 2.4.20-rc1 kernel. The laptop is a Targa 
visionary 1600 from actebis (mobile athlon on a Via ProSavage KN133 
"TwisterK" board). I think I did not have such problems with an older 
acpi version (20021022 ???) - I will check this out).

Now could this be a problem with the acpi implementation or is this the 
result of a wrong usage of acpi?


Btw. - is there any documentation on the /proc/acpi directories besides 
Dominik Brodowski's documentation for /proc/acpi/processor?

Thanks for any help,

   Thomas




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