[GRASS-dev] r.surf.contour inefficiency?

[Hamish]

Hi,

while running r.surf.contour I notice that 33% of the cpu is dealing with
"sys" leaving ~ 65% to run the program. with r.surf.contour using 97% of
the CPU, top says:

Cpu(s):  0.3%us, 33.1%sy, 64.9%ni,  0.0%id, ...

(nice'd because I run GRASS at low priority to keep processing from
slowing down desktop tasks while number crunching)

there is no big disk I/O going on -- is using that much "sys" CPU
indicative of some massive inefficiency in the program? It's a module
which has historically taken a ridiculously long time to run and I don't
understand why the kernel needs to be involved so much.
(linux 2.6.22, 1.5GB+ free memory)


ideas?

Hamish