On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 08:30:59PM +0100, Greg Kochanski wrote: > I'd like to make the case that bug 470629 ought to be fixed in Lenny.
> The bug is that a process spends an unreasonable amount > of CPU time searching, waiting for someone to plug in a chip card. > Now, this may not seem important, but I did the math, and it turns out > to be a surprisingly large waste of energy and money. > On my system, a 2.8GHz P4, it uses 3% of my CPU, 24 hours a day. > For me, this is responsible for a (conservatively estimated) > 1-watt increase in power consumption. > (On more modern CPUs, this ranges from 0.1W to perhaps 0.5W. > I'll take a conservative assumption that most people are running > modern efficient CPUs and that the impact on the average > user is 0.3 watts.) > Now, when you multiply that increase in power by the number of > Debian users (counting distributions that use Debian), it gets > big. With 10 million users worldwide, we are looking at a total > power consumption -- from this single program -- of several > megawatts. (Enough to power several thousand houses or a > good fraction of a percent of a nuclear power plant.) This is hyperbole. Percentage of CPU time is not linearly related to % of energy usage; and multiplying by the number of Debian users is *wrong*, because most users will *not* have this package installed. The reverse-dependencies of libchipcard-tools are limited to med-practice and libchipcard-libgwenhywfar47-plugins (which may be pulled in as a recommends via aqbanking-tools or qbankmanager). >From http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libchipcard, roughly 1000 systems, or about 1.3% of systems participating in popcon, report having this package installed. It looks like I had this package installed on one of my systems for some reason - but the CPU usage according to top was on the order of .3%, not 3%, for a much slower system, which, BTW, has no power management capabilities, so the net power consumption from having this process running is approximately 0. But thanks for pointing it out, I don't need this daemon at all so I've now removed the package from the affected system. :) Anyway, it looks to me like a simpler solution would be to have the libaqhbci13 package drop its Recommends: on libchipcard-libgwenhywfar47-plugins to a Suggests:, which would significantly reduce the number of users having this package installed, causing their power consumption as a result of this package to instantly drop to 0. This should definitely not be treated as RC - but it might be allowable as an "important" bugfix for this optional package and let into lenny on that basis, if the fix is suitably clean. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
