[Techtalk] Userspace applications polling (Re: Gnome wireless manager?)

[Akkana Peck]

> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007, Wim De Smet wrote:
> > The author was interested in just how much disks were polling
> > the harddisk and stat'ing files (to optimize it) and he came up with
> > some amazingly depressing results.

Mary Gardiner writes:
> There were two similar talks at linux.conf.au, including one by the same
> speaker. Video should be up at [1] and [2] within the week
> 
> [1] http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/38
> [2] http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/221

I went to both talks, since I'm very interested in reducing the
excessive amount of polling on my machines. I highly recommend the
second of those two talks, the Ryan Lortie one.  Don't be put off by
the "Gnome Desktop" in his title -- he ranged well outside the Gnome
Desktop and the talk should be relevant to anyone.

Not only did he have a great list of offenders (similar to lists by
Dave Jones and several other LCA speakers) but he concluded with
concrete advice for finding the polling apps and fixing them to work
more efficiently, something I didn't hear in any of the other
performance talks (most of them were like, "Well, yeah, hald
polls but most users want it that way, so learn to love it.")

Eventually the slides from most LCA talks will be available as well
(which takes a lot less bandwidth than video).

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com