excessive use of gettimeofday(2) and other syscalls

[Alexander Best]

On Fri Sep  9 11, Alexander Best wrote:
> 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

...however sites such as facebook produce a much higher syscall peek under
chromium. with only one tab opened with youtube.com in it, chromium has a
typical syscall count of 700-2000. i guess this is due to stuff like js, html5
and friends.

if i enable the flash plugins with only 1 single tab (youtube.com), the syscall
count climbs to ~ 8000 with a peak at 19000 when youtube.com wasn't completely
loaded. so the high syscall count is not only chromiums fault, but a
combination of chromium, flash and the linuxulator.

i believe further linuxulator improvements might reduce syscalls in this
scenario.

also with chromium 15, the syscall count is supposed to drop quite noticably
(as mentioned in a previous message).

cheers.
alex

> 
> 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.