Strigidaemon

[Jeff Mitchell]

David Faure wrote:
> * while the screensaver is shown.
> This is better than shutdown/startup because some computers are never switched off,
> or use suspend-to-ram/disk so the actual shutdown/startup sequence never happens.
> On the other hand, nobody is working 100% of the time, so the screensaver (or doing
> idle-time-detection in the daemon itself, in case no screensaver is configured) is a better
> solution from a user point of view (although not from a writing-portable-code point of view).
> I didn't invent the idea, I can hear Windows XP working on the harddisk for a long time
> once the screensaver shows :)  (could be the anti-virus I guess, but the idea is valid IMHO).

If you have the Indexing Service turned on, which theoretically makes 
searches faster except that it doesn't (yes, believe it or not, Windows 
had this in there before Google Desktop, Spotlight, and so on, except it 
doesn't work) it uses idle time (such as when the screen saver is 
running) to build its database.  This is a major source of "my 
hard-drive is doing things but I'm not doing anything" times on Windows.

Other applications can cause this, of course, but that's a major offender.

--Jeff