Public bug reported:
I've been trying to figure out why my HDD keeps on flushing metadata out
every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gnome-calendar opens
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my machine every minute. This
causes the access time (atime) to be updated causing a metadata flush
afterwards. On an idle laptop this makes the HDD spin up, write data and
then spin down again. This consumes power.
Can this periodic open/closing be fixed or at least try to use O_NOATIME
on the opening to reduce the metadata atime updates?
I diagnosed this by running:
sudo fnotifystat -v -x/sys,/proc,/home
one can see that the gnome-calendar is opening and closing the file.
Looking deeper, I used health-check on gnome-calendar to gather the
attached activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gnome-calendar on the
idle machine. One can see it sleeps for ~60 seconds on a poll() system
call and every 60 seconds opens and closes the zoneinfo file.
To capture the activity I used:
sudo health-check -p gnome-calendar -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-calendar-
5min.log
I'm pretty sure that opening the zoneinfo file with O_NOATIME will avoid
the metadata atime flushes and because the data has not changed on disk
it should avoid the HDD spinup/spindown cycling. Alternatively, can the
zoneinfo reads be avoided totally every 60 seconds to save power?
** Affects: gnome-calendar (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Attachment added: "capture of gnome-calendar activity using heath-check tool"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846768/+attachment/5294333/+files/gnome-calendar-5min.log
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846768
Title:
gnome-calendar opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/* every 30 seconds
Status in gnome-calendar package in Ubuntu:
New
Bug description:
I've been trying to figure out why my HDD keeps on flushing metadata
out every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gnome-calendar
opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my machine every minute.
This causes the access time (atime) to be updated causing a metadata
flush afterwards. On an idle laptop this makes the HDD spin up, write
data and then spin down again. This consumes power.
Can this periodic open/closing be fixed or at least try to use
O_NOATIME on the opening to reduce the metadata atime updates?
I diagnosed this by running:
sudo fnotifystat -v -x/sys,/proc,/home
one can see that the gnome-calendar is opening and closing the file.
Looking deeper, I used health-check on gnome-calendar to gather the
attached activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gnome-calendar on
the idle machine. One can see it sleeps for ~60 seconds on a poll()
system call and every 60 seconds opens and closes the zoneinfo file.
To capture the activity I used:
sudo health-check -p gnome-calendar -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-calendar-
5min.log
I'm pretty sure that opening the zoneinfo file with O_NOATIME will
avoid the metadata atime flushes and because the data has not changed
on disk it should avoid the HDD spinup/spindown cycling.
Alternatively, can the zoneinfo reads be avoided totally every 60
seconds to save power?
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-calendar/+bug/1846768/+subscriptions
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