Enabling RSS feeds nearly triples baseline CPU load

LE23 · January 3, 2017 at 3:57 PM

When RSS feeds are enabled on low-spec hardware, CPU usage at idle increases from 25% to 60%

It appears that this method of scrolling does not utilize hardware acceleration. This is a shocking performance penalty which the user should be informed about when they enable this feature. It would be also be helpful in troubleshooting if we had a CPU meter on the Estuary menu bar (up near the clock.)

**Klojum** · January 3, 2017 at 4:34 PM Official Post

Quote from LE23

This is a shocking performance penalty

Shocking? It's very logical, I would say.

Of course it depends on the hardware, don't you think? On Intel x86-64 hardware it hardly changes the CPU-% at all. On low-powered hardware such as Raspberry Pi's, it's a different matter. The RSS-feed is certainly not 100% GPU-accelerated, so the CPU will have to work hard(er), yes. And CPU-meters are available in the System Info page, or on the OSD Process Info page (or whatever it's called).

LE23 · January 8, 2017 at 2:10 PM

I never said it was illogical for high CPU usage to occur under these circumstances. However, I can promise you that people will be surprised to find that hardware acceleration was not utilized. It is also surprising that such a huge performance penalty would be allowed without notice. When several other services are active at the same time, the user interface will begin to stutter and become very sluggish. Dont you think the user would want to know that RSS feeds are the largest resource hog on the platform, so they can make an informed choice, instead of spending so much time on troubleshooting?

Quote

CPU-meters are available in the System Info page,

Which ruins the usefulness of the feature, because you get no real time feedback when you make changes. If people saw the CPU load triple when they enabled RSS feeds, they would probably switch it back off immediately.