Maemo has 100+ processes running when idle! Why? Can they be killed?
 

Let me start by saying that I'm new to Nokia/Maemo/Linux (save for my g/f's e71x), and have no programming experience whatsoever. Conky is the only insight I have to the 900's performance. But from what I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong, but even with everything that I can turn off, being off:

- No widgets
- Cellular/WiFi radios off
- Calendar widget off
- All apps closed (except app load, but I don't think its a major contributor to the total)

http://home.comcast.net/~masterpiu/screenshot13.png

http://home.comcast.net/~masterpiu/screenshot15.png

...Conky still reports 186 process being active. My Motorola Q (had registry access and heavily modded) and Droid didn't have anywhere near this many active process. My XP Pro with all that I use it for, at most has ~60 processes running.

Is this a little high? Could this be the reason that battery is draining so quickly? If so, any way to dial that number down?

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

It's not about how much processes you have, its how many of those arent sleeping.

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

Well.. just the basics of the GNU/Linux platform do spawn separate processes for most different parts.. plus then you have X windows, then the sound system, then any running monitors or services..

Linux typically has a higher number of processes running at a given time.. I don't think it would effect battery life too much unless one of those processes was constantly hitting the CPU...

Do you have your conky monitoring processor usage?

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

I only have the app (Conky) running, in stock form, from what was DL'd from the the repository (not testing nor dev. versions). I thought that the "processes" listing could have possibly been for "installed" processes, but I had opened a few apps and the number jumped to 218, which is what I suspected...its an "active" listing.

I'm trying to post the pics from my flikr account but I'm new with that...I'll try to move them to my other sharing account, but basically I turned off everything that I could. The only thing running in the status bar is the clock and the battery bar.

p.s. - why did this get moved to the OS forum?

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

In any Linuxsystem a process has very little to do with a program/package. Most of them are actually threads of a program, any given program can use any number of these threads to process stuff "concurrently".
If you run top in xterm look at the %CPU row and you'll see, that even the top most process doesn't use much cpu at all, and most likely it's top itself if nothing else is running.

If you're new to all this and don't really see the connection i'm trying to draw for you, don't worry and maybe just take the word from ppl running some kind of Linux every day. This is a totally typical process count, nothing to worry about at all, the only thing that's relevant, is if the processes use %cpu.

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

The CPU usage 28% is what would annoy me. Does it stay that high? Looking at the processes hildon is the second highest - that doesn't surprise me.. on normal desktops X-windows tends to spike every now and then..

But 13% CPU and 1% Mem just for pulseaudio... damn. I heard people complaining about pulseaudio's usage around here... but still.. damn. On a mobile device that sucks. Does it stay that high?

ETA: Not *quite* as bad as I thought.. your processor is downclocked to 250mhz (it's like speed-stepping on a laptop). So the 28% isn't as scary as I first thought. Still - seems high.

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

open the terminal.

type ps lax and press the return key. Those are all the processes.

In general you should not need to micromanage the number of processes...

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

top is showing me

Maybe conky is the cpu hog?

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

Note on the pulse audio, I think that is just for the "beeping" for the 20 second timer for a "screenshot". Once I take the pic, process utilization normalizes to like 3% at most, for Conky.

The top (4) process are pretty much Conky, @ 2-3%, and some others at less than 1%. I guess I'm looking at it from a Windows PC standpoint...and maybe the DROID as well. Even though the processes were listed , they weren't hitting the processor/battery. I was just shocked to see so many, but if the system architecture is "different", so be it.

Maybe if the 900 had a power/battery usage monitor, something like this (for the less command line inclined):

http://affbook.com/wp-content/upload...tery-usage.png

Re: I turned "EVERYTHING" off, but Conky still reports 186 "processes" active?
 

This is not the status monitor you are looking for...


FYI my linux box has 205 processes at the moment.