[maemo-users] Dealing with N900 responsiveness (or lack of thereof)

[From: Michel Dänzer]

On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 11:28 -0600, Paul Hartman wrote: 
> 2010/2/23 Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net>:
> >
> > When the device is (supposedly) idle, make sure that e.g. htop
> > doesn't show any significant CPU usage by any process other than itself
> > (and Xorg and osso-xterm, if you're running it on the device display).
> 
> I haven't noticed anything, and my load average at the moment is 0.00,
> 0.02, 0.00 which is good, but if I sort by time the top offenders
> since my last reboot (uptime 1 day, 3:14) are:
> 
> 5:41 pulseaudio
> 5:01 bme_RX-51
> 3:59 Xorg
> 3:42 as-daemon
> 3:00 dbus-daemon
> 2:40 hildon-desktop
> 2:41 pulseaudio
> 1:11 pulseaudio
> 1:08 hildon-status-menu
> 1:06 mafw-dbus-wrapper
> 1:02 hildon-home
> 
> rest are under 1:00.
> 
> I used the music player with headphones for 20 minutes this morning,
> and had a 5 minute call yesterday, maybe that explains the pulseaudio
> numbers.

That would mean pulseaudio used more than 20% CPU on average during
those activities, which seems very high. Maybe you're suffering from the
tonegend bug discussed in the other sub-thread. I encountered that once
and it did cause the battery to go down very quickly even though
pulseaudio was only using around 3-5% CPU (but constantly).

> I believe as-daemon is MfE, so it seems it's doing a lot of work to
> get my e-mails.  It is set to "Always On" during during work hours and
> every 15 minutes otherwise. I also have two IMAP accounts configured
> (gmail and ovi).

That does sound more intensive than my IM accounts which probably only
need to exchange some keepalive messages with the servers every now and
then most of the time.

At any rate at least some of those numbers seem to be much lower here
compared to the uptime, which could explain the difference in battery
life at least to some degree.


> T-Mobile's signal is crap everywhere I go, perhaps that drains my
> battery as well. I guess when the signal is weak, the phone has to
> transmit stronger to reach the tower? Most of the time I have between
> 2 bars and no signal whatsoever. :(

Possible I guess, usually five bars here.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer