Re: silent PC vs. emacs

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

  >     Given the number of modes in Emacs that now use timers to do
  >     things during the idel-delay, it might be useful to create a
  >     single-point of customization --- perhaps initially as an
  >     interactive command, that one can invoke to "enter laptop power
  >     saving mode" ---  somewhat similar in spirit to the various
  >     laptop-mode shell scripts floating around the net. 
  > 
  > Is there really anything except stealth fontification that will
  > _continue_ waking up?  As far as I know, everything else just
  > operates once each time Emacs becomes idle.

There seems to be. 

On my Fedora Core 5 machine, emacs compiled with the Lucid toolkit
doing:

emacs -D -Q&
strace -p PID_OF_EMACS

Prints things like this a few times a second:

gettimeofday({1157213370, 605043}, NULL) = 0
select(5, [4], NULL, NULL, {25, 670718}) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
gettimeofday({1157213370, 708405}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1157213370, 708534}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1157213370, 708662}, NULL) = 0
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 99743}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn()                             = ? (mask now [])
gettimeofday({1157213370, 709043}, NULL) = 0
select(5, [4], NULL, NULL, {25, 566718}) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
gettimeofday({1157213370, 812405}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1157213370, 812535}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1157213370, 812663}, NULL) = 0
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 99742}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn()                             = ? (mask now [])
....

so there is some activity all the time. Is this something that can be
avoided?