[scribus] Speed and CPU

[Craig Bradney]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I changed the nice from 0 to 1 and it didn't make any difference.
>
>   
It is unlikely to.. "niceness" can be negative.. to make a program be
less nice to the rest of the system, you would need to use a negative
value.. using a higher positive value will give the other processes more
chance at using the CPU than Scribus. Its probably not your biggest
concern on a normal desktop though.
> Thanks for the tip. Htop does seem to be an improvement over top,
> although it is impossible to read the legends at the top and the bottom
> of the display because the letters are black on dark green. Maybe
> there's an option to change the color scream. I'll man-page it. Another
> option I need to make it sit still. Trying to read it is like watching
> a five-year old in church.
>   
Sure.. all those processes are changing their activity level or active
state. You can change the sort order or pause the display.
>   
>> You generally will find some program that is hogging resources and
>> slowing down the others
>>     
>
> The more I poke around the more I think the problem is that the CPU
> speed is being throttled back by something in Linux. I looked in the
> GUI for power management and found nothing. I don't understand why my
> MHz applet stays at 800 even when Scribus is trying to do something
> that must certainly be CPU intensive. I mean, occasionally it does go
> to 2.0 GHz briefly, but usually it stays at 800 even when I am
> patiently waiting for Scribus to do something.
Your CPU speed governor is probably set to ondemand which many distros
set by default. By the time it kicks up the processor speed (which
doesn't take long), your initial task in Scribus may be completed having
run at 800+Mhz instead of 2Ghz. The bump time can make it sluggish
enough to affect your feeling of a GUI intensive app. I would suggest
setting your governor to performance if you are working on a large doc
or working for a long time. Your distro should provide an easy way to
change it or you can set it manually:
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
will tell you what governors are built int your kernel
echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
will set ondemand.
Note those both touch cpu0.. you may need to do each one separately.

Craig