Hello all,

I've noticed that skype on slackware 13.37 with:

- a full default install
- updates from /packages installed
- a new/clean home
- regardless of the desktop environment (flux,blackbox,xfce,kde)
- 3 different computers all different cpu speed , but all using intel video
- two computers have built in uvc webcam and once computer has a usb webcam that uses the uvc video
- all computers run without any xorg.conf.d files and xorg.conf file as well. all machines use whatever X gives them when X starts up (p.s. that's really sweet )

All computers take 20-25% cpu use when using skype's built in "video test".

In chat the computers are 50-60% use.

I find it hard to believe a sandy bridge 7 machine needs this , and I find it hard to believe that a netbook would yield the same perf as an i7.

So given the above, it seems that the performance hit of running skype on all of these machines are essentially the same. So this appears to me to be a software matter of some sort.

All machines have DRI and run slack 13.37 perfect so that's not an issue.

Other distro's only consume 3-4% when running this built in video test. They consume about 10% cpu use when in video chat.

Distro's tested :
-Fedora 16
-Ubuntu 11.10

What I've tried to get the cpu use down

- upgraded to mesa from /testing
- upgraded libdrm and mesa to that which slack --current is using by building them here on my machines to avoid --current breakage concerns
- upgraded uvc drivers
- tried the static version with the above under each scenario vs the shared lib version.

The only thing that I can think of is that those distro's are using pulseaudio. Perhaps that is the missing link? Perhaps it's simply bad/lousy performance in skype for using libasound (alsa) only ?

I did notice that running ldd on the binaries in the other distro's that kerberos is in play as well.

Perhaps skype is using some codecs packages from gstreamer ? I have not built any of these over and above what comes with slackware.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Fogie

My problem porbably isn't same as yours, but here is what I've experienced: The CPU usage seems normal during startup and normal usage, but when I suspend my computer and then wake it up, Skype starts eating te CPU. Currently I'm not able to check the version numbers etc. since the computer in question is not with me right now, but I vaguely remember that this started happening after I upgraded to the then latest Skype, and the 2.0.0.72 (or whatever) version before was alright. Again, as far as I can recall, the reason was the sound system (Skype wasn't able to play sounds after wakeup, I think). I remember trying to fix the situation by starting it up with command line parameters to point it to the Sounds/ directory of the Skype installation, but I don't remember if it worked. Because of this issue (and lack of necessity, too) I gave up my habit of keeping Skype open in the background and currently I'm using it very rarely.

Some time ago I read an article about skype. When skype is running in background - it is acting as a node of skype's own network. Thus it can produce traffic, and use CPU resources, since its network traffic is encrypted. And after that article (unfortunately lost link), I consider skype as a malware software, which I have to use sometimes for my own needs. But I never leave it open in the background, since it is simply unsafe. It can gain access to your filesystem and do something on its own. Just another blob software, which should be substituted, but currently there is no opensource alternative.

Do you mean text chat or voice chat?

I use skype a lot on my fairly puny ultraportable packard bell dot u with intel chipset and with text chat it uses 0-3% of one CPU. Its CPU usage goes up during voice/video chat but not to a level that interferes with other things I'm doing (I'll monitor % and post back here later).

As for skype being malware - certainly you've got a point, but sensible (perhaps even default) firewall settings seem to stop my instance ever becoming a supernode. I'd rather not have a proprietary binary like this being so central to my daily existence, but work requires it

Hello All,

@mcnalu:
When I'm in a video chat, the cpu use of all 4 cores is 50-60% cpu use.

And this seems hardware independant. The atom/netbook ; the sandy bridge tower and laptop as well.

Very high cpu use for the testing of video and in video chat compared to other distro's, and especially to windows (but I'd almost expect that since this is beta).


regarding privacy, when I tried opensuse on the laptop, I was going thru their wiki on how to install skype, and I found this very interesting:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Skype#Privacy_and_security

it's a quick read, I wonder if that is still the case?

I'm on a skype call just now - audio, no video - slackware 13.37 32bit on my ultraportable (Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU U5400 @ 1.20GHz) and the CPU use is 33% on one core and both cores are sitting at 666MHz, their lowest speed. Will investigate CPU usage with video when I get a chance.

No idea if that alarming info on the OpenSUSE wiki still applies, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Well, Skype has to wade through all your data. Checking your firefox history and bookmarks, computer history and other personal data and stuff to send to their servers. And perhaps it's using your computer resources before it sends all relevant data nicely indexed to their servers for their clients.

So I built mesa 10.2 so I can build/install kde 4.8.0 and it's dropped the cpu use down some while in video chat. It's not as low as the other distro's, but I'll take what I can get.