system monitor update interval is not in seconds

[Matthew Woerly]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

Ubuntu 8.04
The system monitor preferences has a value for the update interval that claims to be in seconds. If I set it to one, however, it updates many times per second. Changing it to 5 gives an update that is about 1 second.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

confirming, will look upstream, thanks for your report.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Actually, it works fine if you compare the seconds with the timelines on the graphs, how did you profile them?

[Matthew Woerly (nattgew)]

Well I guess if you look at the timeline it might be right, but the option is not for the timeline interval, it's for update interval. I think that if it updates at a different interval than you set, regardless of how it graphs it, it's a bug.

[Cinar Sahin (csahin)]

I can confirm this. Setting the interval to 1 second causes about 50 updates for a 30 second interval. The graphs are drawn correctly, the only problem is the number of updates.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

May you send it upstream since you're facing the issue? For forwarding instructions please take a look to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME thanks in advance.

[Matthew Woerly (nattgew)]

I've forwarded it, thanks for the helpful link.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for your help

[James P Michels III (james-p-michels)]

Confirmed on my 8.04 installation.

I believe the updates are off by a factor of 10 though. So that an interval setting of 10.00 yields an actual update rate of 1 per second.

[Bungaman (thisisabreachofprivacy)]

seems to be correct. I also have to set it to 10 so that it refreshes every 1 second.

[Steffen Banhardt (steffenbanhardt)]

still there in 9.04

[MestreLion (mestrelion)]

Some hints that might help debugging:

The FIRST and SECOND refreshes happens at the correct interval. Steps to reproduce:
- Open up System Monitor and switch to Resource tab
- Set the interval to 10,00 (using the buttons, not keyboard - theres another bug associated with keyboard input)
- Click Close (the dialog box)
- Note that actual refresh now is 1s
- Close the program
- Open it again and just watch
- The FIRST refresh takes 10 seconds to happen. You can notice that by CPU % box change
- The SECOND refresh takes another 10 seconds to happen. You can notice that by CPU % box change
- The THIRD and all subsequent refreshes now take only 1s

The offset is confirmed to be 10 times faster.

This behavior might be caused by a locale misreading of textbox value. In some locales (like Brazil), the decimal placeholder is "," (comma), NOT "." (period). So "10,00" = 10 and "10.00" = 1000. As in the US its the opposite, a value input of "10,00" in a PT-BR locale computer may be read and erroneously converted by internal functions as "1000", according to EN-US locale. And, as max value of this field is 99, maybe it is converting all values above 100 to MILLISECONDS instead of seconds, thus resulting in 1000 milliseconds = 1 second. So the problem may be just the software is unaware and not respecting system locale. Its a wild guess, but who knows ?

My 2 cents...

[MestreLion (mestrelion)]

Question: as this problem was already forwarded / upstreamed, should i double-post my comments at bugzilla too ? Im not sure how the process works...

I dont have a bugzilla account, and even if i had, im not sure if double-posting would be the correct procedure... but i also dont like to post comments at the wrong places, as they maybe be unnoticed...

[MestreLion (mestrelion)]

Last but not least, this bug seems to be closely related to #93847 and its various duplicates...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-monitor/+bug/93847

"Excessive CPU usage by Gnome System Monitor"

In fact, all those bugs may be just a symptom of this one: a refresh 10 times faster causes a HEAVY cpu usage.

Is there any way to link all these bugs with this one ? If not as duplicates, at least as related bugs ?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug has been sent to GNOME as showed by the tasks table, the bug number is http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526071