Resource-usage report showed ~29 cores of average load coming from i3blocks
helper scripts forking awk/tr/grep/bc/sensors/nvidia-smi every tick. Rewrite
all five hot-path scripts to eliminate forks:
- volume.sh: persist mode, blocks on 'pactl subscribe' event stream.
No polling, no sleep, no fork per tick.
- gpu_monitor.sh: persist mode, single long-lived 'nvidia-smi --loop=5'
feeds a bash 'while read' loop. Falls back to /sys for amdgpu.
- battery_status.sh: reads /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/ directly.
Zero forks; replaces 'acpi | awk' pipeline.
- cpu_monitor.sh: reads /proc/loadavg and k10temp/coretemp /sys/class/hwmon.
Zero forks; replaces 'sensors | awk | tr' + bc arithmetic.
- motherboard_temp.sh: reads nct*/it*/f71* Super-I/O hwmon node directly.
Zero forks.
Configure volume + gpu_monitor with interval=persist so i3blocks keeps
one long-lived producer each instead of forking per tick.
Also add:
- kill_stale_recorders.sh -- kill stray ffmpeg x11grab / dotnet-trace /
dotnet-monitor processes left running after sessions.
- monitors.slice -- resource-capped user slice (CPUQuota=50%,
MemoryMax=512M, MemorySwapMax=0 for zram safety, TasksMax=256) to
bound future monitoring regressions.
- efficient-polling-scripts SKILL -- rules for writing status-bar and
polling scripts without forks; fork-pipeline to bash-builtin translation
table; verification checklist.
Verified live: strace -c on cpu_monitor.sh shows 1 execve / 0 clones;
persist producers (pactl subscribe, nvidia-smi --loop) show 0 CPU ticks
over a 3s idle sample. Per-invocation timing 1.6-1.9 ms (was 30-80 ms).
