#6468 NORM Never A: Crontab runs things at high frequencies, breaking suspend

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#6468: Crontab runs things at high frequencies, breaking suspend
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 Reporter:  gnu     |       Owner:  jg                               
     Type:  defect  |      Status:  new                              
 Priority:  normal  |   Milestone:  Never Assigned                   
Component:  distro  |     Version:  Development build as of this date
 Keywords:  power   |    Verified:  0                                
 Blocking:          |   Blockedby:                                   
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 As soon as Ohm is able to resume from suspend in order to let processes
 wake up from sleep at the right time, we'll have Ohm waking up all the
 time, because of high frequency stuff in Cron that doesn't need to be done
 that way.

 The crontab in update.1-rc2 is running:

 /etc/cron.d/olpc-pwr-prof  every 4 minutes.  Even though it's useless
 because the command it runs (/usr/bin/pwr) isn't in the release.

 /etc/cron.d/olpc-update-query runs every 15 minutes.  And when it runs, it
 rolls a random number to decide whether to send a query off to Cambridge.
 How about if it rolls those random numbers once, and then sleeps until it
 REALLY wants to send a packet?  (The lucid comment by Scott is "check to
 see if it's time to check for a software update".)  This code shouldn't be
 running every 15 minutes; it should do exponential backoff to a frequency
 of once a day or once a week; or allow its query to Cambridge to set its
 frequency for subsequent periods (so when we know a release is
 approaching, a few days in advance we can set the frequency to "more
 frequent"; the rest of the time it would be slow).

 /etc/crontab wakes up once an hour to do "run-parts /etc/cron.hourly",
 which is empty.  It shouldn't wake up at all, if there's nothing to run
 then.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6468>
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