[maemo-developers] suspendprocess - poor man's power save

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Attila Csipa wrote:
> On Monday 20 September 2010 17:35:34 you wrote:
>> There are some potential downsides for just suspending processes
>> completely.  Most of the processes have subscribed to several
>> different D-BUS messages, X events etc.
>>
>> For example D-BUS will infinitely buffer messages that are sent
>> to a connected client but not read by it.  If these messages can
>> be very frequent (say device orientation & network condition messages),
>> this will soon bloat D-BUS memory usage quite a bit.  After D-BUS
> 
> Hmm... the external launcher that suspends is meant for apps that cannot 
> really handle/listen to dbus in the first place
> - if they can, they should react to the lose-focus / screen off messages
> directly,  not through intermediary daemons, right ?

All UI apps (including SDL games) get focus events and can react to
them.  If e.g. game continues although it's not focused i.e. user
cannot interact with it, that's pretty bad usability.

But games ported from Desktop might still be showing e.g. some
"pause" animations when they aren't focused.  If they aren't on D-BUS,
suspending might be an OK hack for them.  IMHO it's better to fix
the program properly though, but that takes more time...


	- Eero