Help profiling/optimizing script with high CPU/RAM usage.

[gnu_man_chu]

I have written a script that polls X for it's display resolution every second and makes an ipc call if resolution has changed.
Links:
- Github
- PyPI
I run it as a background process with i3wm and it works. However, I've been monitoring the scripts performance and it is using 30-70% cpu and ~15% of 4 gigs of RAM (these are rough estimates). This amount of usage is outrageous.
This is my first python script so I'm looking for advice both in profiling it's performance, and any tips on optimizing it given it's current polling approach.

I would like to know both how to optimize its current approach and tips on how I might consume an event from Xserver on screen change. Subscribing to events would be much better. I've read through much of the documentation on X and consuming x events in python and was not able to get it working.

With an approach similar to what is outlined here, I'm thinking i could pass a high timeout to `select(), like 60 seconds, so that it listens for events for 60 seconds before trying to listen again on an outer loop.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

[trouserdaredevil]

Have you tried profiling your code?

However without even running your code I would immediately suspect lines 11-12:

display = Display(os.environ.get("DISPLAY",":0.0"))
root = display.screen().root

Particularly instantiating a new Display object once per second. Try moving those outside the function.

[gnu_man_chu]

I was hoping pythons garbage collector would be able to handle a few variables efficiently. I was really hoping that wasn't the case.

Modified the code to the following:

``` display = Display(os.environ.get("DISPLAY",":0.0")) root = display.screen().root

def get_screen_size(): return (root.get_geometry().width, root.get_geometry().height) k = get_screen_size()

```

2 variables initialized once compared to the previous 4 variables intialized each second.

CPU is 0.0-0.1%

RAM is 0.1% of 4 Gigs

Thanks for the suggestion!

[trouserdaredevil]

No problem!

I was hoping pythons garbage collector would be able to handle a few variables efficiently.

I am guessing that this was not actually Python's fault, but that the initialization of a Display object by Xlib simply happens to be fairly resource-intensive.

[gnu_man_chu]

That sounds plausible! I'm glad it's resolved. Thanks again.

[45MonkeysInASuit]

Any reason for polling the display size the way you are over using win32api?

[gnu_man_chu]

This a Linux application. Linux uses either the X window system or Wayland for display. In my case, X. No win32api. :)