Sheep too processor intensive

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 00:48 — ruzzell

Electric sheep causes computer to run hot. Left to run as screen saver for just 10 or 15 minutes, in a room 65 degrees, puts internal laptop fans into high speed on a MacBook Pro. Happened occasionally with previous version. Problem much worse with new version. On hot day in the summer, would not be viable to let the machine run this hot for long periods of time for the sake of running this saver. Am considering returning to the onboard Apple screen savers.

Thu, 01/07/2010 - 04:08 — dasvo

What is your version version

What is your version version of screen saver exactly? What machine exactly you have? What is your display and decoding fps setting?
Does the fan get to the full speed in the first 10 minutes of screen saver? After 10 minutes, the rendering starts and it can have impact on the CPU load. Do you have the all_cores setting set?

Can you open the screen saver in preview mode (small preview in System preferences) and tell me what is your CPU load for System Preferences at that time? Usually on MBPro you should be around 20-50% unless rendering is started which happens after 10 minutes. The fan starts at about 70% of CPU load.

Thanks.

Tue, 12/22/2009 - 11:33 — Smitty2k1

Will sheep ever be decoded

Will sheep ever be decoded with the GPU instead of the CPU? Hardware acceleration seems to be all the rage in video decoding these days.

Tue, 12/22/2009 - 12:38 — spot

it's not on the agenda yet.

it's not on the agenda yet. rendering is the problem, not decoding.

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 01:47 — spot

make sure you aren't

make sure you aren't rendering with all cores: install the latest version, then delete your ElectricSheep.cfg file, so it regenerates it with the default setting (off). check your cache size and make sure it's big enough, then run it again. otherwise sorry, it shouldn't be like that i certainly wouldn't recommend putting your machine at risk!

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 23:45 — ruzzell

no such file

Thanks for the suggestion. I do have the latest version installed. 2.7b21. But a Find on the HD shows no file named "ElectricSheep.cfg" present.

Tue, 12/22/2009 - 10:05 — spot

~/Library/Application

~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep/ElectricSheep.cfg

Thu, 12/31/2009 - 18:14 — ruzzell

still runs too hot

The location of that file is: Users/[user]/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep/ElectricSheep.cfg (The HD also contains a Library/Application Support folder.) However, deleting it does not appear to help this problem. New version of Electric Sheep still appears to be too processor intensive to run on this platform, due to temperature of the computer, unless the user is willing to put up with/permit machine's fans to run at high speed for extended periods. Possibly these would also be inadequate at very warm room/condition temps running this screen saver. Mac Powerbooks and MacBook Pro's are know to have temperature issues, due to processor speed etc.

Thu, 12/31/2009 - 20:24 — spot