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Posts: 11 | Thanked: 0 times | Joined on Apr 2010
#21
i have searched and posted before about this but to no avail, anyway.. apart from being a fine netbook, my n900s second use is as a games machine. i come from a background of windows gaming and killing every process ala amd fusion, or like back in the day with ctrl alt del.. to kill anything that isnt required for gaming. in htop/conky being told there are 151 processes or so.. well i have no idea how the maemo architecture works and how effient it actually is but i assume all these things working away in the background or waiting to work must harm performance somehow? im hoping to learn what i can and hopefully write a script to kill off any functions that wont benefit gaming.. one for online gaming and one for off.. so can anyone advise me here? or provide me with some info so i can find out what individual processes do etc, thanks everyone
 
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Posts: 60 | Thanked: 9 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Swindon, UK
#22
Ohh, I found something out about this the other day! I can't remember where mind you.

Like you, I have been a Windows user for years, and have to shut everything down to game.

I found out that the 150ish background processes are just how Linux works, and unless they are active it's fine. Mind you... I can't find the source of that information now, I'm starting to think I may have imagined it :S

Wait, I've found it:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=39760

Chris
 
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Posts: 3,159 | Thanked: 2,023 times | Joined on Feb 2008 @ Finland
#23
this sounds like "wtf idle process is using 99% of my cpu. I'll kill it immediately!!!"
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Posts: 1,427 | Thanked: 2,077 times | Joined on Aug 2009 @ Sydney
#24
 
Posts: 642 | Thanked: 486 times | Joined on Aug 2008
#25
Linux works differently than windows - normally as you use Linux it caches stuff into RAM and quickly fills it up, this is a good thing because if you have paid for 4GB of ram then Linux will USE ALL 4GB of ram, windows will only use what it needs, so if you never use 4GB it's a bit pointless paying for it.

And when an application starts up Linux just removes old ones and frees up ram.
 

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Posts: 20 | Thanked: 10 times | Joined on Jan 2010 @ Australia
#26
Originally Posted by rash.m2k View Post
Linux works differently than windows - normally as you use Linux it caches stuff into RAM and quickly fills it up, this is a good thing because if you have paid for 4GB of ram then Linux will USE ALL 4GB of ram, windows will only use what it needs, so if you never use 4GB it's a bit pointless paying for it.

And when an application starts up Linux just removes old ones and frees up ram.
On a side note Windows Vista and onwards does this now too. (Although Vista didn't do it very well :P)
 
Posts: 5,335 | Thanked: 8,187 times | Joined on Mar 2007 @ Pennsylvania, USA
#27
The thread "151 processes, are they all needed?" with six posts has been merged into this thread.
 

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Posts: 601 | Thanked: 549 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ Redditch, UK
#28
Originally Posted by ossipena View Post
this sounds like "wtf idle process is using 99% of my cpu. I'll kill it immediately!!!"
LMFAO nice one!!!
 
Posts: 1,306 | Thanked: 1,697 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Durham North-East UK
#29
just for info if anyone is curious heres the output of top on my build pc. excuse the high lod and cpu usage but it is compiling the google android source when i took the info (nitdroid).

Code:
top - 16:03:10 up 13 days, 21:04,  3 users,  load average: 1.69, 0.90, 1.15
Tasks: 115 total,   3 running, 112 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  5.8%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.6%id,  2.8%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    610800k total,   429768k used,   181032k free,    81728k buffers
Swap:  5887812k total,    51148k used,  5836664k free,   185136k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
24968 root      20   0 24216  16m 2896 R 36.5  2.8   0:00.40 /prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.3.1/bin/../libexec/gcc/
24970 root      20   0  8744 7040  864 R 16.8  1.2   0:00.12 /prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.3.1/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-
24969 root      20   0  2380 1072  800 R  1.4  0.2   0:00.02 top -c
as you can see it also has a high number of processes (im not running any xserver so itys likely why its slightly lower)
 
Posts: 12 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Dec 2009
#30
your 155 "processes" includes kernel threads ( every process in [ ] ). That's mostly hardware drivers. I'm lazy to count, but its probably ~30. Then there's plenty processes like init that rarely ever get used. ( init on the n900 only when you boot up and when you shut down, I believe ).
All in all this is by design, not because of sloppiness or bloat, and the existance of a process does not indicate that it takes a significant amount of ressources.
Since windows isn't a single-threaded system or even kernel, and even though i dont know its architecture internals, its pretty obvious that theres a huge amount of "threads" or similar that are simply hidden, but exist nevertheless.

cheers,

valdyn
 
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active processes, battery drain, battery life, conky, cpu use, fremantle, idle, kill process, kill processes, linux, maemo, maemo 5, process, processes, under the hood


 
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