excessive use of gettimeofday(2) and other syscalls

Dieter BSD dieterbsd at engineer.com
Fri Sep 9 16:31:35 UTC 2011


>> Firefox 5 and 6 has more gettimeofday call than 20000 per second on my
>> amd64-8.2-stable box.

> i don't see why chromium needs
> to call gettimeofday(2) or any library function that triggers it more
> than 3000 times a second.

What the <BLEEP> are web browsers doing that they "need" the clock
so often?

I suspect the answer is the same as why firefox uses significant amounts
of CPU when it should be idle, why it uses memory without bound
(I actually had to add ulimit to my shell's rc file :-( ), and
so on.

Using "links -g",
"ktrace -di -tc -p6951; sleep 1; ktrace -C; kdump|wc -l"
gives a typical count of 300-400, highest count seen: 1454.

What we need, is a sanely written web browser that has the
features we need. Unfortunately the last time I checked,
links and dillo both lacked features needed for online
shopping/banking.


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