Best Puppy for low CPU usage?

[Al1000]

I've noticed on my old laptop that CPU usage with the system "idling" has varied from around 5 - 7% to 12 - 15% with Lucid 5.2.8.6, 5.2.8.7, and Precise 5.7.1. Whereas using Mint 13 MATE, Kubuntu 12.04, Debian and LXLE, CPU usage is around 1 - 3%

On my desktop pc which is far from being state of the art, but much more capable than my laptop, I run Kubuntu 14.04. With the rotating desktop cube enabled, lunar app on the desktop, weather app in one of my two panels and conky displaying on all four desktops with a transparent background, CPU usage doesn't go above 0% with the system "idling." I also have frugal installations of Precise 5.7.1 and Lucid 5.2.8.6 on that computer, and CPU usage sits at 1 - 2% with them.

Do all Puppies use more CPU resources than "full" Linux distros, with the system at "idle," and if so why?

Puppy is still of course faster than any of the other distros I mentioned, and I intend to keep on using it regardless, but I'm interested to find out more about why it uses so much CPU resources in comparison and what can be done about it.

I have been informed that the desktop icons could account for much of it, but surely that can't be the only reason? I have tried a few other Pups, although not extensively, but I reckon I would have noticed if CPU usage had been much below what it is with Lucid 5.2.8.6 and Precise 5.7.1.

[Fossil]

You could try using Htop to monitor running processes. It's interesting to view the second-by-second variations between CPU, MEM%, TIME+ and Command. Even the older Puppy's do this.

[Al1000]

I've used Htop before but somehow got into the habit of using top in the terminal. I also have the top 5 processes permanently displayed on conky on my desktop.

What I've noticed with Puppy though, is that the list of processes doesn't seem to account for all of the total CPU usage.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=83931



P.S. Can someone please explain how to embed attachments on this forum?

[Moat]

Do all Puppies use more CPU resources than "full" Linux distros, with the system at "idle," and if so why?

Hi Al -

Of the more than dozen Puppies I've spent a fair amount of time toying with, Carolina has consistently been the one with the most apparent low idle CPU use - right in line with the mainstream Linux distros (~1-3%). The newest Vanguard version (with a bleeding-edge 3.18.1 kernel) seems even better in that regard, with idle bouncing between 0 and 1% on my old dual-core test laptop. Outstanding!

And installing the excellent OpenboxPlus onto Precise, from here - http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86206 - brought Precise's idle down to a more normal 2-3% on my machines.

In the bigger scheme of things, I suppose these variances really might not mean all that much - but, likely due to my limited computing knowledge, it just kinda' bugs me. That - and the fact the fan on this old laptop sounds like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel when running - has made the noticeably higher idle CPU use (and fan cycling) of some late Puppies a deal-breaker, for me.

I mean - with a modern, multi-core computer having a great deal more computational power than the systems which carried man to the moon and back aboard Apollo (or so I've heard) - ~10% of those formidable resources being used to do what... draw a nice picture on the desktop, and tell us the time?? I know there's certainly a lot more going on than just that (beyond this noob's scope)... but still. Something just doesn't seem quite "right" there.

Bob

[Peterm321]

I have a recompiled upup raring kernel combined with Openbox and the idle (no major tasks running and tray applets etc disabled) cpu usage is 2%. Xorg is the main task that takes cpu on an idle system.

The tray applets are easily taken care of if you dont want them. Typically they are scripts so inserting a line "exit 0" near the start of them disables them.

You dont even have to go that far if you are picky about messing with scripts. A task can be suspended and resumed using the kill command combined with pidof.

kill -19 <pid> suspends a process and kill -18 <pid> resumes it. The PID of a task can be found from the output of the pidof command.

so kill -19 `pidof <NAME>` will suspend a process with name NAME.

Its just a matter of finding the process names of the tray applets (should show in top/htop) you want to suspend and putting the corresponding suspend commands into a script.

As far as I can tell, most Puppies with 2.6.x and 3.x.x Kernels are compiled with CONFIG_HZ=300 to CONFIG_HZ=1000.

300 is the default for Raring. The core clock frequency relates to how often the CPU is interrupted in the Kernel core even when few processes running.

You can see how often the CPU gets interrupted by checking the contents of the file /proc/interrupts . Local timer interrupts for example can show a few hundred interrupts per second.

I recompiled the Kernel with CONFIG_HZ=100 (the default used by the 2.4.x kernels and in my experience there isnt a problem although I dont need the better latency that comes from a higher clock frequency that some audio processing programs may need.

[Al1000]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll check out Openbox and Carolina.

The tray applets are easily taken care of if you dont want them.

Would the tray applets be likely to use more CPU resources in Puppy, than in Mint/*buntu/etc?

[Peterm321]

Would the tray applets be likely to use more CPU resources in Puppy, than in Mint/*buntu/etc?

I'm not running a full Ubuntu or Mint distro so unsure. Also those kind of distros would tend to use KDE or other window managers that tend to be more resource intensive that xfce/jwm/openbox. It might be possible to recode a few of Puppy's tray applets to Perl which I think compiles to a faster interpreted byte code rather than a shell script. I would just tend to disable them or accept them provided they used less than 5% cpu.