2

those of you who dont know what conky is, its a GUI for desktop raspbian that shows you loads of information about your pi at that moment, for example temperature, CPU usage, ip address of the pi, storage space, and loads of other stuff.

What i want to know is how to decrease the amount of CPU it requires. If i pause conky in task manager, my CPU drops from 9% to around 1%.

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks in advance:)

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  • Does it have command line options? Have you tried man conky? – joan Nov 4 '17 at 6:37
  • that works, but how would i decrease the CPU usage? I would like to remove unnessceart stuf such as ip address, – Darkest N2O Nov 4 '17 at 7:11
  • I don't know or use conky. Look through the man comments. Is there any option which deals with time or frequency? If you are not sure then edit the man contents into your question. – joan Nov 4 '17 at 7:16
  • google.ca/search?q=configuring+conky+linux – goldilocks♦ Nov 4 '17 at 13:34
5

Monitoring system vital signs by conky and other similar applications is done with a combination of setting up event handlers and periodically polling various pieces of data.

Where the CPU time is really consumed is during the polling which is why when you pause conky you see the drop in CPU usage.

There are two fundamental approaches to reducing the load on the CPU of an application polling. The first is to increase the polling period so that the application is not polling as often. The second is to reduce the number of things polled and the effort spent polling.

I suppose there is actually a third approach which is to reduce the load imposed by the User Interface. So a graphically intense User Interface with graphics and images can impose more load on the CPU and GPU than a plain and simple presentation of the information.

I suggest you experiment with conky and check the CPU usage to see the effect of the change. The first thing would be to turn off the reporting of information you do not care about. Secondly would be to increase the polling period. Thirdly would be to go with a simple and plain theme.

See this article Expert's Guide to Configuring Conky as a starting point.

Here is a link to the conky wiki which has a lot of information about the various settings. You will need to review what work your installation of conky is doing and decide what things you are willing to do without.

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  • Will try this out and see what results i get, thanks for your help. – Darkest N2O Nov 5 '17 at 16:51
  • I just used sudo nano .conkyrc and removed the stuff i didnt need by putting # before the line, works, and im happy! ;) – Darkest N2O Nov 13 '17 at 15:31

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