powertop(8) Points at gpg-agent.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

gnupg 2.1.18-1 on Arch Linux.  I noticed powertop ranking the
gpg-agents, one per user, quite highly, and their impact is multiplied
by their number.  strace(1) showed the two-second select(2) timing out
with no syscalls in between, and the forking of two siblings to have a
`GETINFO pid' chat every minute.

Hans-Christoph Steiner noticed back in 2012, and Werner pointed the
relevant #defines.
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2012-March/026589.html

    # define TIMERTICK_INTERVAL          (2)
    # define CHECK_OWN_SOCKET_INTERVAL  (60)
    #endif

There's a few relevant patches by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, e.g. cancelling
the socket check if inotify(7) can be used.
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2016-November/032012.html

Are there any plans to make gpg-agent consume less background resources?
It remains running here when a user logs out.  Is that common?  A
variety of users logging in over time divides TIMERTICK_INTERVAL quite a
bit.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy