EmulationStation Consuming 65% CPU on Idle

[drake999]

Hello everyone. While testing RetroPie on a Pi Zero W, I'm finding that the EmulationStation process is consistently consuming about 65% of the CPU resources while idle on a stationary menu screen. Is this normal? Any way to fix or get around this?

[mitu]

@drake999 Did you enable the power saving options ? It considerably reduces the CPU usage when idle.

[drake999]

@mitu thanks for the suggestion. I was not aware of power saving options. Where do I find them? I'm less concerned about idle CPU usage and more concerned about reducing the load generated by background tasks while running games. I probably should have said that initially, sorry. At the time I was mainly curious as to why that is the case, as on a Pi 3, barely any CPU is used when idle. I'm trying to get 32X emulation playable on my Pi Zero W. It's very close with my overclock, but a bit to slow. It's possible some clever tweaks could make the difference.

[mitu]

@drake999 said in EmulationStation Consuming 65% CPU on Idle:

Where do I find them?

They should be in the Emulationstation main menu - under Other Settings. It should be called Power Saver Mode. My observations are from a Pi3 system - I use the Default option for power saving and have the screensaver set to DIM after a few minutes.

[drake999]

@mitu OK thanks for the info. I'll take a look at that.

[Clyde]

@drake999 said in EmulationStation Consuming 65% CPU on Idle:

I'm finding that the EmulationStation process is consistently consuming about 65% of the CPU resources while idle on a stationary menu screen.

With or without videos? If the latter, did you enable the OMX player in Other Settings of ES' Main Menu?