[Sunhelp] strangeness when monitor in power-saving mode

[Bill Bradford]

I've got "xset +dpms" (monitor power-saving mode) enabled in the Solaris8
beta, so that the monitor goes into standby mode and then turns itself
off after so many minutes of nonactivity.  However, something I've noticed
thats a bit strange - the system seems to chew up a LOT of CPU when its
sitting "idle", when I'm not here (this is my desktop at home).

Check out http://www.sunhelp.org/images/cpumeter.jpg

This is "wmmon" - a WindowMaker doc app that monitors CPU usage, I/O,
etc.  I had it set to the CPU usage graph (similar to "xload") all day.
The "valley" in the graph, noting CPU usage going DOWN, was when I
*got home for the day*.  The little "hill" afterwards is me reading some
mail and firing up GIMP for the screenshot.

My wonders - what is happening during the day that is causing the high
CPU load at idle?  Nothing is running in the background, no seti or rc5
clients, just netscape and a couple of RXVTs open (no animations on 
the netscape web page open either).

Could the DPMS portion of the X server be using this much CPU while just
polling for keyboard/mouse activity to know when to turn the monitor back on?

Bill

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+------------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+
| Bill Bradford          | mrbill at pdp11.org     | mrbill at mrbill.net     |
| http://www.sunhelp.org | http://www.pdp11.org | http://www.mrbill.net |
+------------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+