How can I reduce my app's "Idle Wake Ups"?

Question

Mavericks is mad that my app has too many "Idle Wake Ups". I know this has something to do with timers and the way OS X tries to make my app more power efficient. How can I debug these idle wake ups? Or what are some likely causes?

Answer 1

Possible causes are the typical reasons threads wake up from awaiting:

• Timers going off
• Threads blocked on I/O (incl network and IPC) waking up
• Threads blocked on locks waking up
• Spurious wakeups (but these are too rare to be causing your issue)

If you fire up instruments, you can try the System Trace and System Usage tools to diagnose when your threads are waking up.