Comment 25 for bug 599425

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Neil J. Patel (njpatel) wrote :

@zekopeko Well, none when your not doing any work :) Unfortunately, unless your desktop is completely idle (nothing changing) the compositor is at least painting the screen. In my tests (and these are on-going with every release), we don't wake up on a completely idle desktop.

With a blinking terminal window and a changing indicator (say sound, network and messages), Mutter (with unity plugin) doesn't register on PowerTop at all.

Finally, with youtube playing video, mutter's process comes in at 0.5-3% wakeups, with chromium and npviewer.bin (which contains flash) coming in at 10+% wakeups each (on my Intel i965). I think this is pretty good for a gl compositor, though I need to do some more thorough tests when I get home.

Again, we still want to improve further, but currently the focus is on idle CPU usage and CPU usage when playing videos (which is work to workaround Clutter's paint cycle).