I'm not a developer but there are a few aspects of wine that I'm interested in. I've searched around, but can't really find answers to my questions. First of all, it appears that wine-dev's only use mailing lists as their primary means of communications. This forum is labeled "Wine Users", so probably the wrong place to ask, but there's no "Wine Developers" forum... Anyhow, if I'm off topic, just ignore me. So, regarding minimizing windows. It appears to me (though I'm not really sure if this is the case or just my perception) that many games and 3D intensive programs on Windows XP reduce their CPU usage when you minimize their window. It appears that Windows or maybe the graphics card drivers notices that the window is minimized and that it doesn't need to flip the off-screen buffers to the window or screen, then skips that operation for a tiny savings in CPU. Does Wine do this or would it be hard or potentially dangerous to do this in Wine (ie, such a change could break lots of currently working apps)? I admit that my observations are not very scientific. I haven't actually measured CPU load, just looked at my XP Task Manager's graph. I'm just noticing the CPU spike when I run some Windows apps when I run Wine and instead of having to quit my programs, it would be nice to have some way to "minimize" them (both physically and CPU usage).
On 2011-03-09 (March, Wednesday) 15:10:09 ischou wrote:> it would be nice to have some way > to "minimize" them (both physically and CPU usage).Why not use killall -s STOP or kill -s STOP to stop processes you don't need anymore and killall -s CONT or kill -s CONT to continue them when you need them again? Of course typing in terminal these commands is not convenient for frequent use so you can use hotkeys (run "sudo apt-get install hotkeys" to install hotkeys on Ubuntu or Debian) or keytouch to stop/continue all or specific list of Windows applications (running under Wine) by press of a button on your keyboard. This would give you much more useful effect than "minimization" on Windows. I can give you some examples if this is what you want.
Well, in the case of some games, doing what is essentially a "Control-S" often will lock up the game or disconnect the game from the internet (if that is the case). In some apps (like 3D rendering apps) I can start a render, and minimize the window. The program is still doing the computations, but my computer fan doesn't blow as low and the CPU load seems to fall a bit. Most of these programs run great in Wine (just as fast, if not faster than in XP), but the CPU usage seems higher. This all could just be my imagination.
Nothing specific, no. I just noticed on my dual-boot machine that the same program running when booted in XP uses some amount of CPU but not 100%, but when I run it in Wine the same program pegs one of my cores at 100% and causes the computer fan to spin like a jet engine. So far, my experience is that if a program works at all in Wine, it runs great, sometimes even faster than native but seems to use a lot of CPU. Just wondering if there are ways to "calm down" the CPU usage without sacrificing all that great performance. I'd prefer not to "nice -n19 wine program.exe" This could all just be a "perception" difference and that windows is less aggressive about cooling my system than "apm" does or something. Well, asked and answered. Thanks.
Well, my problem is not exactly that my computer is noisy (though it can be at times), but that it seems noisier when I'm running programs in Wine than native XP, and my original question is whether Wine CPU usage can be selectively/temporarily throttled back by using tricks/hacks like minimizing the window. But thanks for tips on computer health. I probably should vacuum all the dust bunnies out of my computer, vents, and power supply too, but it seemed easier to just see if there was a "software solution". [Laughing]