News fetch CPU hog on mac

[oldstrega]

downloaded calibre. watched video tutorial. tried to newsfetch the wall street journal. first try jumped to 187 degrees fahrenheit. nice. CPU was taxed 110 percent turned the fans up full bore. tried again. 165 degrees; CPU 110 percent.

immediately zapped the program but given its acclaim i thought i'd ask some questions.

does the news feature not work so well on the mac?
or is just the wall street journal a bad idea?

so far, calibre wins for app that drove my mac to the highest temperature ever witnessed on my imac.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by oldstrega

downloaded calibre. watched video tutorial. tried to newsfetch the wall street journal. first try jumped to 187 degrees fahrenheit. nice. CPU was taxed 110 percent turned the fans up full bore. tried again. 165 degrees; CPU 110 percent.

immediately zapped the program but given its acclaim i thought i'd ask some questions.

does the news feature not work so well on the mac?
or is just the wall street journal a bad idea?

so far, calibre wins for app that drove my mac to the highest temperature ever witnessed on my imac.

I don't believe the MAC is under cooled. 165 (MAC's work in F?) is it just getting warmed up


MY PC is set to start throttling at 85C and shut down at 95C.

Run a BOINC project if you like to hear CPU fans SCREAM. All cores: 100%: all the time

Conversion is a CPU hog.
But it is doing a lot of work, beating those bytes into shape for your reader.

[user_none]

After the news is downloaded it is converted to an ebook. Conversion are inherently CPU intensive processes.

[oldstrega]

ok, guess i won't be doing that w calibre.
seemed more like a virus trying to kill my computer.
i use handbrake to rip video and max/xld to convert flacs but i ain't ever seen 185 fahrenheit taxing 110% percent. run the SMC fan control at full bore and your 160 ripping blu ray.
i thought it was like some WSJ RSS for free or something, not a motherboard killer.
my take, as a total beginner, is perhaps calibre is good for cataloguing ebooks from amazon and barnes & noble. not really my kind of thing but hey if it works for you.

[itimpi]

If your Mac cannot handle running at 100% CPU load for lengthy periods of time then there is something wrong with it! Any modern machine should be capable of that if it is required.

I make sure that Calibre is running at a low priority so that although it ma be consuming all free CPU, I am still free to do foreground work without being adversely affected.

[oldstrega]

OR the conversion aspect of the software is NOT the best written out there. i can't imagine converting the WSJ to epub is a more intensive task than converting a flac audio file to apple lossless.

the role of the quality of programming affecting CPU usage and temperature is evident comparing XLD flac conversion to Max. Max often converts at a 30 degrees lower temperature using less CPU. i could imagine a different programmer writing better conversion scripts that don't tax the CPU 110%.

i don't think there's anything wrong with my 3.06 ghz intel core 2 duo and 8 gb ram imac.

maybe i'm wrong and my computer sucks. keep calibre same and disregard user feedback.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by oldstrega

OR the conversion aspect of the software is NOT the best written out there.

It's written for accuracy, and for ease of maintaining. I could rewrite large parts in assembly and that would make it faster and less resource intensive. But that would be a waste of my time and isn't going to happen.

Originally Posted by oldstrega

i can't imagine converting the WSJ to epub is a more intensive task than converting a flac audio file to apple lossless.

It is.

Originally Posted by oldstrega

the role of the quality of programming affecting CPU usage and temperature is evident comparing XLD flac conversion to Max...

If you don't like how long and intense calibre's conversion is then I would suggest you use something else more to your liking.

Originally Posted by oldstrega

i don't think there's anything wrong with my 3.06 ghz intel core 2 duo and 8 gb ram imac.

If you're not willing to let an application actually use the CPU and all that RAM then why have it?

Originally Posted by oldstrega

maybe i'm wrong and my computer sucks. keep calibre same and disregard user feedback.

If there was a real issue then your feed back would be seriously considered. As it stands now, all I see is a complaint that a CPU intensive process causes your fan to turn on and that bothers you.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by oldstrega

ok, guess i won't be doing that w calibre.
seemed more like a virus trying to kill my computer.
i use handbrake to rip video and max/xld to convert flacs but i ain't ever seen 185 fahrenheit taxing 110% percent. run the SMC fan control at full bore and your 160 ripping blu ray.
i thought it was like some WSJ RSS for free or something, not a motherboard killer.
my take, as a total beginner, is perhaps calibre is good for cataloguing ebooks from amazon and barnes & noble. not really my kind of thing but hey if it works for you.

Stop looking at the Temps (you have no clue as to what is harmful (Since no other MAC user has this issue, I guess your MAC is a POS if it can't protect itself from a heavy crunch) and what is just heavy use ). IMHO the only problem with a MAC ownership is their $$$ removed from my wallet

[user_none]

Originally Posted by theducks

IMHO the only problem with a MAC ownership is their $$$ removed from my wallet

My primary computer is the 11" Air. All of my calibre development happens on this machine. Show me another laptop that is as small, light, full metal, equal quality to the Air. Oh and one that has a real CPU (core 2 duo isn't the fastest out there but it's still serviceable.)

[oldstrega]

my bad.
it is intensive. disregard. flac conversion now running about the same as that day i imported the wsj into calibre.
guess it's about really using your CPU full bore.
shouldn't worry the mac'll shut itself down if the temp gets too high.
just rarely seen those temps before.
didn't mean to cause a ruckus.

however, after further experimentation, i think i prefer pdf to epub format for annotation purposes. devonthink pro rules.

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by oldstrega

my bad.
it is intensive. disregard. flac conversion now running about the same as that day i imported the wsj into calibre.
guess it's about really using your CPU full bore.
shouldn't worry the mac'll shut itself down if the temp gets too high.
just rarely seen those temps before.
didn't mean to cause a ruckus.

however, after further experimentation, i think i prefer pdf to epub format for annotation purposes. devonthink pro rules.

Keep in mind that some of the recipes that are included with Calibre farm an INSANE number of articles off the source site due to how far back their RSS feeds go. I haven't delved deep lately, but last time I checked, a lot of them didn't do much culling of old articles to reduce size/time. The fact that Calibre is written in Python does add some overhead compared to a fully "native" application, but it really only shows up in conversion (which happens at the end of a fetch and is where the CPU time you see is going). Most of the rest of the time, the app is waiting on the OS to finish copying a file, fetch data from the network, etc.

At one point I wrote my own newspaper fetching app to have better control over culling articles, layout, and output that the Sony models preferred (full TOC support as if you bought it from Sony, for example). Even then, it still took a good 2-5 minutes to pull down the articles from 3 papers over a 24 hour period. Calibre fetches tend to pull down every article in the RSS feed which can easily be 5-10 times that.