excessive use of gettimeofday(2) and other syscalls

[Alexander Best]

On Fri Sep  9 11, Dieter BSD wrote:
> >> 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.

well that measurement is probably unfair. my measurements included all opened
tabs (~ 15), running plugins and extensions. if i disable all of those extra
stuff and use only a single tab, chromium produces less syscalls than links:

270

cheers.
alex

> 
> 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.