Conky new_mails and tcp_portmon problems

Hi all,
I spent this weekend fooling around with Conky and trying to customize
it. Although it’s a powerful little system monitor, Conky is by no means
“easy on the resources” as stated in many places all over the web.
Specifically, there are two issues I couldn’t solve no matter how I
tried:

  1. The Conky home page on Sourceforge states that Conky can read your
    mail folders and notify you of new mails; well, I couldn’t make the
    command new_mails work with Kmail no matter what. The command mails
    for listing your entire Inbox folder works seamlessly, problem is, I’d
    like to be notified of new mail only, I honestly don’t care that my
    entire Inbox folder contains 17689 mails. I’ve also experimented with
    the command mailboxes and what not – to no avail. Has anyone
    succeeded in making Conky work with Kmail without resorting to
    workarounds/scipts?
  2. Several of the Conky configuration files circulating the web contain
    a section for listing your current incoming and outgoing connections.
    The snippet goes something like this:

Code:

Inbound Connections: ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 count} $alignr${color7}Local Service/Port
${tcp_portmon 1 32767 rhost 0} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 lport 0}
${tcp_portmon 1 32767 rhost 1} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 lport 1}
${tcp_portmon 1 32767 rhost 2} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 lport 2}
${tcp_portmon 1 32767 rhost 3} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 lport 3}
${tcp_portmon 1 32767 rhost 4} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 1 32767 lport 4}
Outbound Connections: ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 count}$alignr Remote Service/Port$color1
${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rhost 0} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rport 0}
${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rhost 1} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rport 1}
${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rhost 2} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rport 2}
${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rhost 3} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rport 3}
${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rhost 4} ${alignr} ${tcp_portmon 32768 65535 rport 4}

Basically, what it does is list five of your incoming and five of your
outgoing connections by domain name and port. Well, I’ve noticed that
this snippet (probably due to extensive DNS lookups that it performs?)
slows down Conky almost to a halt; sometimes it takes as much as 10
seconds
for it to just redraw its window, which is quite incredible on
my dual-core 2GHz machine! Er… make that 15 seconds. Also, with the
above snippet enabled, Conky will take as much as 3-4% of processor
time, frequently reaching the first place in my Top window and
surpassing even Xorg itself! Needless to say, all those problems go away
if I delete the above snippet from Conky’s config file.
Now, is it only me, or are those assertions about Conky being extremely
light on your resources, just a plain lie? What are your personal
experiences with Conky – if any?


http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/
Even if free software were crap, it should still get our preference
over the non-free crap secreted by IT corporations.
-A free rephrasing of RMS-

JosipBroz’s Profile: http://forums.opensuse.org/member.php?userid=4188
View this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php?t=400803

Update. I’ve actually managed to track down the “new mails” issue to a
supposed “feature” (or bug) in Kmail: apparently Kmail doesn’t use “new”
folders at all – although it does set them up when you create an
account. It just cunningly keeps them permanently empty. Go figure…
Anyway, the “resource hogging” issue still holds. Any ideas anyone?


http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/
Even if free software were crap, it should still get our preference
over the non-free crap secreted by IT corporations.
-A free rephrasing of RMS-

JosipBroz’s Profile: http://forums.opensuse.org/member.php?userid=4188
View this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php?t=400803