Resource hog - was Re: [K12OSN] Re: test childsplay packages (FIXED)

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 20:14 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:

> Is it a "feature" that the program takes over the desktop?  By that I
> mean, I wanted to see what resources the program was using, but couldn't
> ctrl+Fx to another desktop where I had "top" running.  When the program
> is running nothing else can be done on the station.  Good to control
> little kids I guess, but makes it hard to administer the PC until you
> kill it.

Since I couldn't look at top on another desktop I went and looked at top
from another terminal (duh!) and saw that this app is using anywhere up
to 65% peak and 40% average CPU resources.  By contrast, I checked out
the resource use of gcompris (which is perhaps becoming less favoured
here in k12ltsp?) and saw that it behaves nicely, chewing up no more
than 15% peak and 7-8% average of CPU resources.  

(Again, this is on my PII 450MHz LTS and ties in with the separate
thread I started about gaming apps using so much CPU that on my sort of
hardware I can only run one session of many of them).  

So much for their deriding gcompris on their website:
(quote) Childsplay is a 'suite' of educational games for young children,
like gcompris, but without the overkill of c/c++ and the gnome environ.
(endquote).

If that's the difference between a badly written app bringing my machine
to its knees then give me the overkill of a well-written c/c+ app any
day :-/ 

-- 
Regards, 
        Gavin Chester