Been travelling a few weeks ago. When I do that, I don't take my normal
laptop with me. Instead, I put the hard drive in my old netbook (a
Samsung NC10), because it isn't as valuable.
In the past, this wasn't a big deal. But this time, it could hardly use
it. Everything was really slow. Sure, the CPU is not particularly
powerful and it just has 1 GB of RAM, but I'm usually just starting X11
and run a bunch of terminals. So what's the big deal?
First of all, infofeld[0] causes huge slowdowns. It spawns many
Python processes that run in parallel and that only live for a short
time. Start Python, stop Python, start Python, stop Python, ... that
little system surely doesn't like that.
[0]:
https://uninformativ.de/git/infofeld/
Even after I disabled infofeld, the system felt slow. I wonder how much
of this I can blame on the Intel screwups (meltdown, spectre) and the
patches needed for that.
Well, I'm too lazy to run benchmarks. It still bothers me that infofeld
is such a hefty application. Should I try to optimize it? It drains a
lot of battery power on my normal laptop, too.
I guess the key to optimizing it is to integrate it more tightly.
infofeld is just a bunch of scripts now, that create image files. You
need an additional shell script around that, which repeatedly invokes
the actual infofeld scripts. This causes all the fork()s and context
switches. If there was only one Python process that does all that, it
might be better.
And maybe rewrite it in C. The current Python scripts cannot create
farbfeld images directly -- they have to create PNG files and then call
"png2ff", which causes even more fork()s.
Either way, I think it's time to refurbish infofeld a little bit. (Now I
only have to find the time to do that.)
