Well if my reading is correct, the housekeeping happens in handle_tick(). 3
things are happening:

1. Checks for lost parent. This could be converted to a signal (at least on

linux)

2. Checks for socket permissions. This is checked only every 60 seconds, so we

don't need to wake up every two seconds to check it.

3. Checks for lost connection to scdaemon... does this have to happen so

frequently?

dirmngr also seems to wake up often to check the if it's time to do housekeeping
(which it does every 10 minutes). Seems like this could also be improved?

scdaemon does seem harder, but not everyone is using smartcards.

Any objections to upping the value?

It looks like it's due to TIMERTICK_INTERVAL being set to 2 on UNIX platforms so
that it can call handle_tick() every 2 seconds. It looks like handle_tick() just
checks if we've lost our connection to scd, if we've lost our parent, and less
frequently that the socket permissions are correct.

I'm not sure why we would need to check these things every two seconds. Also we
could detect parent death (on linux at least) via PR_SET_PDEATHSIG instead of
polling.