[PROBLEM] XBMC idle CPU at 80%

[Fred]

The process xbmc.bin runs at ~80% cpu usage for me when XBMC is idling. I have already tried searching the web for solutions but none of the solutions I have found seem to work for me.
I use the standard theme, turned off rss reader and the wheather add-on. I have checked the usage with top via ssh.
Anyone knows what could cause this or how to troubleshoot this problem?
Which XBMC idle CPU% are you guys getting?

Edit: Okay I found something about dirty regions, is this already enabled in XBian?

[Fred]

I found out it has something to do with my "recently added" on my homescreen. Whenever there is an item on the screen with a title that does not fit (so it is abbreviated with dots) the CPU load goes crazy. Whenever this is not the case the CPU idle load is around 20% which seems to be normal. Is this a bug from the skin or from XBMC?

[Koenkk]

(14th Apr, 2013 05:41 PM)Fred Wrote:  I found out it has something to do with my "recently added" on my homescreen. Whenever there is an item on the screen with a title that does not fit (so it is abbreviated with dots) the CPU load goes crazy. Whenever this is not the case the CPU idle load is around 20% which seems to be normal. Is this a bug from the skin or from XBMC?

No, this is just normal behaviour. You can disable the recently added thing in the settings.

[mk01]

btw: RPI power consumption at idle and peak is almost the same. there are many measurements on the internet. It's the SoC, heat the same always, consumption ... not too much difference on load.

[namtih]

It's a known bug/issue of the XBMC graphic framework. So all skins have this issue.
Every time you see a scrolling text the complete screen is rewritten all the time and not only the text.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=156320
Ticket: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/14136

Hopefully there will be a solution soon as it would really help.

[JayBlanc]

Maybe patch xbmc/Application.cpp to change the "unsigned int singleFrameTime = 10; // default limit 100 fps" line to "unsigned int singleFrameTime = 3; // default limit 30 fps"

I don't think this affects video playback, just the gui. Even if it did, there's not much that the RPi can play back above 30fps in software.

High CPU use when scrolling text *can't* be fixed in XBMC unless they ditch their current GUI render system, because it constantly polls for changes and then renders them as fast as it can up to that 100fps limit. Yes, there's absolutely no reason to render scrolling text at 100fps, but it happens because they also wanted to use the XBMC gui to render high frame rate visualisations.