Using 15% CPU even at idle?

[Larry Gagnon]

I am enjoying Stellarium very much. Running under Linux on an i5-5300 laptop with 16GB RAM. The CPU is dual core with 4 threads. All is working fine and the log is showing normal and no errors.

I have noticed though - that even when idling (time paused, all plugins shut off, no object highlighted) Stellarium consumes about 12-16% CPU on average - causing the fan on my laptop to go on once in a while, despite doing nothing while focused on a different workspace entirely.

This is not a serious problem - I simply wonder why it would require so much CPU horsepower doing nothing? (or nothing obvious anyways !).

Thanks for reading...

Larry

[Georg Zotti]

It doesn't "nothing", even with time halted. 15% means 60% of one core is busy. Remember, every frame is computed anew. Depending on asteroids and satellites, you may have a few thousand objects to solve. What else would you do with your CPU time?

If this is too much, reduce idle frame rate to 5 or even lower. 

[Larry Gagnon]

Thank you for that - I missed that config setting. It works great for me at frame rate 4 and keeps the fan from cycling.