AMD Power Gadget Window - Disabling updating in background

trulyspinach / SMCAMDProcessor

Power management, monitoring and VirtualSMC plugin for AMD processors

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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AMD Power Gadget Window - Disabling updating in background #87

Open thomaslfessler opened 4 years ago

thomaslfessler commented 4 years ago

In the AMD Power Gadget Window:

Running with a 3900x.
Drawing the Frequency, Temperature and Power graphs graphs consumes ~15% of system resources.
Disabling the graphs in code reduces CPU utilization to 0.2%.
When application is minimized, CPU utilization does not reduce, indicating the Frequency, Temperature and Power graphs are still drawing in the background and consuming CPU resources.
Options to disable graphs in the foreground, or when placed in the background would be a useful addition.

aluveitie commented 4 years ago

You can just quit the App, the power management is done by the kext independent of the App.

trulyspinach commented 4 years ago

Indeed, why kept the windows open if you don’t want to see the graph? I believe all Cocoa applications will stop rendering when minimized to background, it could be the timer task that is running that forcing CALayer to update. I will do more profiling soon, but I’ve never saw the application use more than 5%. And I am as well using a Ryzen 3900

aluveitie commented 4 years ago

I'm also seeing 15-20% CPU usage in the Activity Monitor

edit Looks like it also creates quite some load (15-20%) on the WindowServer process.

thomaslfessler commented 4 years ago

I'm also seeing 15-20% CPU usage in the Activity Monitor

edit Looks like it also creates quite some load (15-20%) on the WindowServer process.

The load is directly attributed to the drawing routines. Not that the visualization of the graphs is a bad thing, it's just a bit resource intensive on macOS Catalina 15.5.5 with a 5700XT running a 4K display.

Running the distributed application, AMD Power Gadget is currently using 15.7% CPU utilization. Any time the displayed graphs displays a large variance in values, CPU utilization increases to 18%+.

In ViewController.swift, commenting out lines 113, 115, 120 and 121, CPU utilization for the app drops to 0.1%.

Enabling just the temperature graph, CPU utilization sits at 5.5%, about 1/3 of the recorded usage.

trulyspinach commented 4 years ago

The information you have provided is not helpful at all. Yes of course directly disabling some functionality in source code will reduce CPU usage. Plus 15% is very much acceptable. Beware that activity monitor uses Unix style display in which that 15% is not of your whole system, but a single logical thread. Though it is always good to optimize and reduce resources usage. It would be helpful if you directly open up a pull request or provide a profiling of the current drawing program.

aluveitie commented 4 years ago

I went back to version 0.6.1 and re-tested. There was virtually no CPU load by the App back then. I assume the new fluid drawing added afterwards is the source of it.

And the differences are not neglectable. The new implementation seems to results in 10-15 Watt increased power usage while idle with temperature up by about 2 degrees compared to the old implementation.

thomaslfessler commented 4 years ago

@trulyspinach. Hmmm. And here I thought I clearly demonstrated chart drawing is the source of the CPU usage. Showing with drawing enabled (15-18%)- disabled(0.5%), and with one chart enabled out of 3 (5% or 33% of the load) ~ VS the overall low percentage on your machine with a 3900x.

@aluveitie - Good catch on increased power consumption and temp increase due to the drawing routine.

cuongvoong commented 4 years ago

I noticed the increased power usage too while idle as @aluveitie has mentioned.