Screensaver CPU wastage
29 Mar 2006 6:51:42 UTC
Topic 190988
(moderation:
I've allowed the Einstein screensaver to run on two of my machines, knowing it must waste some cycles, but thinking it was surely very minor.
Finally today I observed that on my Dell 8600 laptop (Banias Pentium M 1.4 GHz, mobility Radeon 9000 graphics) results from the same sequence finish in just about 75% of the time with screen saver off--whether it is because my wife is working in Word, or just the machine is idle but with screensaver set to "none". (I got a string of "short" results from z1_0238.5. Screensaver on CPU time is about 37 minutes, off is about 28)
I'm pretty sure that on my P4 EE HT with NVIDIA GeForce4 TI4200 graphics the wastage is far, far less, but not certain.
In both cases the current science application is Akosf's S-39L.
Anyone else measured Einstein screensaver impact recently?
And, yes, all my screensavers are set to "blank" or "none" now. Anyone know whether "blank" still chews time?
Screensaver CPU wastage
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Yes,setting the screen saver to "blank" is the way to go with any of the projects.
I rarely even look at any of the screen savers myself.
I remember back in the Seti Classic days when people would run it with the screen saver running and depending on their processor we would see them with over 100hr averages per WU.
I set all of mine to blank in 1 minute (most of us have always done that)
You can take a look by right clicking your task bar and clicking on the "task manager" and take a look at the processes to see the CPU usage which will be running at 98% (2% is just the task manager running on the screen)and take a look at the memory usage with screen saver on and then when it is off.
16,000k difference on this AMD 3200+ w/1gig ram