Playing & CPU fan constantly running. Should I be concerned?

[sumofchemicals]

My CPU fan is constantly on as soon as I open Battle for Wesnoth. Is this something I should be concerned about? I was just wondering if it means some process is flipping out and running the processor unnecessarily or something.

I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 on a Macbook. 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2Gb memory. My system monitor is showing one processor around 25% and the other is constantly at 100%. Once I close the game the CPU usages drops and the fan turns off after a minute or two. Is the game really that resource intensive when I'm not even playing, I just have it open?

[m0ta]

Of course, since the game is constantly redrawing and playing music in a loop.

[Iris]

Emphasis on "constantly redrawing". Turning map, standing and idle unit animations off could help.

Wesnoth has the same effect on this laptop with a dual core 64-bits AMD processor. It can easily reach 72°C playing Wesnoth on summer. There was an attempt to stop invalidating screen areas when the application is minimized but it didn't work well for all platforms/SDL versions IIRC.

[Gambit]

I was just wondering if it means some process is flipping out and running the processor unnecessarily or something.

Maybe Wesnoth is just right on your computer's capabilities.

What's the memory usage on wesnoth.exe? (or doesn't Ubuntu's resource monitor break things down by process?)

[penguin]

What version of SDL do you have? When I tried upgrading to 1.2.14 on Mac, my MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz couldn't even handle it properly (and it was using 100% of one core), but with SDL 1.2.13, it uses a max of 30% CPU scrolling around a map (usually more like 20%), and when it's just idle, looking at map, it's around 5%. (Those are both % of one core.)

[sumofchemicals]

Thanks for the responses.

Is there a better place to look for my SDL version than the synaptic package manager? My installed version is listed as 1.2.13-4ubuntu4. I don't know for sure which version you're referring to. Memory is 26MB on start screen, once I load a saved campaign it's 128MB. I did notice that the CPU usage goes to 100% even before I've loaded a game.

*Edit, I misread your question.

[Gerion]

I had a similar Problem, also with Ubuntu 9.10 (64bit), but 6GHz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb memory. Whenever I started Wesnoth it used 100% of my cpu, the sound was crappy or missing and I even wasn't able to close the program and hat to kill it via console.

It seems this is a wrong library issue...
I fixed it by replacing the libsdl-alsa package with the pulseaudio one, making it work perfectly.

Just use: sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio

After that the cpu usage of Wesnoth dropped on my Computer from 100% down to about 5%

I hope this works for you as well

[sumofchemicals]

Thanks Gerion, I'll have to take a look at that and see if it helps.

[denix]

Hi all,

SDL seems to be the problem with macOSX too. Here is my solution:
http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=38746

Enjoy Wesnoth!