Bug#721298: boinc-client: Idle Detection Not Working Computer Always In Use

[GUO Yixuan]

Control: tag -1 + upstream

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 11:39:28AM -0400, GUO Yixuan wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 03:14:43AM -0500, Preston Maness wrote:
> > Snippet from log file:
> > 
> > > 31-Aug-2013 03:02:40 Initialization completed 31-Aug-2013 03:02:40
> > > [---] Suspending computation - computer is in use
> > 
> > After several minutes, the logs at /var/lib/boinc-client/stdoutdae.txt
> > still only state that the computer is in use. Network activity
> > continues of course, as per the xml file with the settings. But no CPU
> > or GPU activity.
> > 
> > Is there perhaps a log of the activity that boinc is supposedly
> > detecting? I suspect there could be a background process of some sort
> > on my machine that is being detected as active user activity, leading
> > boinc to believe the computer is in use. But I can't find any logs
> > that look relevant in /var/lib/boinc-client/.
> 
> Could you check if you have libxcb-dpms0 package installed? I suspect
> that this is related to the idle-time function in boinc, and this
> library didn't end up into boinc-client's dependency because it
> functions as a plugin...

There's another possibility: do you use tmux or screen with a clock in
its status bar, or do you use some system monitor program that runs in a
tty or pts (term emulator), and that is constantly updating? (such as
top or htop)

I just investigated boinc-client's idle detection function, which is
pretty complexed, and it checks all tty and pts's atime as a step,
beside mouse and keyboard timestamps from kernel and X11.

Try to run boinc-client without those constant-updating-terminal
programs, and see if there's any difference.

(Actually this idle detection function is not quite satisfactory, imo ...)

The relevent code is in client/hostinfo_unix.cpp, in the function
bool HOST_INFO::users_idle() (notice that the first one is for apple,
and the other is for linux/unix-like)

Cheers,

GUO Yixuan
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