[squalou]

Hi all,
it's been stated severall times that xbmc eats a lot of CPU when idle.

Up to 90% with default settings,
and around 30% when "advanced settings" are well tuned.
(rss feed disabled, dirtyregion tweak)

I'd like to post here a sum up of what to do to spare rasPi some CPU cycles :)

Personally, instead of having xbmc up and running 24/24, I made a script that monitors HDMI state.
When something is turned on on the other side of the cable (TV, sound system ...), xbmc starts.
When turned off : xbmc shuts down.

These scripts are available for archlinux in AUR :

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xbmc-pi-manager/

they can be easily adapted to any distro, only the packaging and the systemd script is specific to arch I think.
(git repo is in the PKGBUILD file)


And to have a complete post, here's a working "advancedsettings.xml" file for frodo :

Code:

<advancedsettings>
   <network>
       <cachemembuffersize>5282880</cachemembuffersize>
   </network>
   <fanartres>560</fanartres>
   <imageres>256</imageres>
   <useddsfanart>false</useddsfanart>
   <gui>
       <algorithmdirtyregions>3</algorithmdirtyregions>
       <nofliptimeout>0</nofliptimeout>
   </gui>
   <lookandfeel>
       <enablerssfeeds>false</enablerssfeeds>
   </lookandfeel>
   <bginfoloadermaxthreads>2</bginfoloadermaxthreads>
   <showexitbutton>false</showexitbutton>
</advancedsettings>

[Milhouse]

You don't need to add the "algorithmdirtyregions" and "nofliptimeout" settings to advancedsettings.xml on a Pi, it already uses those values by default.

"useddsfanart" is disabled by default on Pi.

RSS can be disabled in Settings -> Appearance -> Show RSS news feeds.

"Show Exit button" can be disabled in Settings -> System -> Input Devices (disable Mouse & Touch screen Support), and bginfoloadermaxthreads usually defaults to 2 on most Pi distributions.

The point is, pretty much of all of the entries in your advancedsettings.xml file are completely unnecessary on a standard Pi and shouldn't be set for no reason, particularly when they are just duplicating the defaults.

The only options with any merit are fanartres/imageres and I have no performance problems setting these higher than yours (512MB Pi), and the default cachemembuffersize is often adequate when using a wired network.