> I guess the main problem here would be profiling as gprof won't
> notice the amount of time spent there, similarly to how allocation
> costs went unnoticed in the ninja case.
Here's another angle on profiling gnash.
I am running "powertop" on Ubuntu 9.04 on an Acer Aspire One, and have
gnash-0.8.5 (the standard Ubuntu package) running in a web browser for
YouTube. Powertop showed more than 1000 wakeups/second from gnash
doing nanosleeps.
The screen only refreshes at 60 Hz; you can't draw any faster than
that. Why is gnash waking up at 1-ms intervals?
The result is that the CPU jumps between its lowest possible speed
(800 MHz) and its highest, because it sees intermittent but
significant CPU load. This burns a lot of power.
When I quit gnash, the wakeup load goes down to 78 wakeups/sec,
mostly hardware interrupts.
When I refresh the page and run a Youtube video, it goes down to 270
wakeups per second, half of which come from gnash. When I pause the
video, it goes up to about 400 wakeups/sec (140 from
schedule_hrtimeout_range from gnash, and 120 from do_nanosleep from
gnash). When the video is done, and YouTube is just showing
thumbnails of other videos, that's when the wakeups go to 1300/sec.
It seems to be really jamming the CPU when it *isn't* playing
video!
John
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