Continuous CPU Load in Hyprland - Animation manager always ticks?

[APokorny]

If I ssh into a device showing hyprland with waybar and no window in the currently shown desktop and with rainbow borders deactivated. I still see Hyprland waking up continuously, and generating new frames. Is this just my setup - do I still have animations active? I attached gdb to hyprland - trying to follow the flow and wakeup reasons - and this seems to be caused by timers for animations.

Does Hyprland lack a "dirty scene" - needs redraw - tracking, and maybe something to suspend animations when they are not in any visible workspace?

[gulafaran]

while profiling i have seen this occur yes, something about animations keeps ticking yes. i have not found out as to why tho.

[gulafaran]

@PaideiaDilemma might know more

[PaideiaDilemma]

Generally, every animation is an "Animated Variable" and they are queued into a global list of currently animated variables.
They are updated according to your highest monitors refresh rate, as long as there is at least one monitor and the session is "active" (tty is active).
The animated variables also trigger damage depending on their type.
So yes, it can very well be that some animation causes permanent redraws (with animated gradient for example, we have to do that).
But it shouldn't happen. Generally there should always be a reasonable trigger for an animation an every animation despite the gradient animations are expected to finish in a reasonable amount of time. When we are idle an are not using animated gradients, it is expected to stop ticking at some point.

Can you give some context about your setup, so I could look into it?
In any case, when I have some time on the weekend, I will check if there is something obvious that could result constant redraws. The damage overlay may help to identify what's going on as well.

[gulafaran]

well just as an example i turned off animations, enabled = false, nothing is animating then i assume, atleast not when opening new apps. profiling Hyprland afterwards for a little bit. my total cpu usage of like what 79% because dgpu and other shenanigans i still spent 0.03 of the profiled time in animation ::tick which seems odd,

[PaideiaDilemma]

Yeah I mean that could be just fine, but it could also be that there is some animated variable that gets update all the time for no apparent reason.

The thing is that even when animations are disabled, tick is still responsible for setting the animated variable to it's value.

[PaideiaDilemma]

Ok looked into it a bit. (Sorry didn't get to it earlier)

First, I want to clarify that even when animations are disabled, the animation manager will tick, but instead of fading values, it will "warp" them.

Now in terms of idling without a window:
I tested that with a minimal config and without waybar. Did not see the animation manager tick at all. Used a debugger to break at g_pAnimationManager->tick() to verify that.
When I for example switch workspaces, I do hit the breakpoint.
Potentially, a waybar configuration could trigger some update that makes the animation manager tick. I tried my waybar config, which does not introduce any of those updates though.
There is also a animation for ctm-control, which may cause ticks when you don't expect them.

@gulafaran, could you try to break at tick() in a nested instance and dump m_vActiveAnimatedVariables?
That vector should be emptied after a call to tick() when animations are disabled. And when that vector is empty, we are expected to not tick until it is filled again. When you find out that the vector is not emptied, or there is a variable that is constantly added, it would be nice to know from where that happens.
Maybe we could add some heuristics for animations. That would help to spot stuff like that.

Addressing OP's questions: @APokorny

do I still have animations active?

If you have them disabled - no. It's just that we still use the animation manager's tick method in order to update values either way.

Does Hyprland lack a "dirty scene" - needs redraw - tracking, and maybe something to suspend animations when they are not in any visible workspace?

Hyprland does have full damage tracking and tries to be as efficient as it can.
An animation in a different workspace would need to be triggered somehow. Assuming one was triggered though, Hyprland would NOT render a frame for it, but it would update the value that is associated with the animation, which should be cheap in terms of cpu usage.