Robert Tilley <tilleyrw@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
When other people responded to my posting concerning system usage, I knew it was a possible issue. Specifically, it is the fact that gkrellm shows an average of 50% CPU usage when KDE is running, and about 3% when Blackbox is running which seems to indicate that something about XFree86 is sucking up system resources.An examination of top shows: PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 18412 root 16 -10 112M 52M 23096 S < 27.3 28.3 32:12 XFree86 18536 tilleyrw 11 0 10832 9M 8172 S 6.3 5.3 9:04 kdeinit 18630 tilleyrw 9 0 13696 12M 10992 S 4.8 6.7 0:17 kmail 18622 tilleyrw 11 0 8136 7660 4388 S 2.8 4.0 4:37 qtella 18516 tilleyrw 9 0 2788 2272 1992 S 2.1 1.1 1:16 gkrellm 27957 root 17 0 1028 1028 780 R 1.7 0.5 0:01 top 18613 tilleyrw 9 0 22868 16M 10948 S 0.9 8.9 1:44 kdeinit 18617 tilleyrw 9 0 27216 20M 10860 S 0.7 11.1 2:30 kdeinit 18614 tilleyrw 9 0 7868 7352 6956 S 0.1 3.8 0:02 kdeinit 18615 tilleyrw 9 0 22028 16M 10688 S 0.1 8.6 0:09 kdeinit <SNIP>This taken during a system lull. I'm tired of having to kill processes to reduce a 99% system usage. Could any other users recount their experiences with exhaustive system usage when running KDE?-- Comments and information are appreciated. Flames, rants, and other miscellany are routed to /dev/null. Robert Tilley, tilleyrw@cfl.rr.com
I'm no expert, but the multiple instances of kdeinit seems strange. I took a look at my system and only had 2 instances. One had a PID for Klipper, and the other had a PID for Konsole. Both were bouncing up to near the "top" of the TOP listing, but they never stay there long enough to get a screen shot. When I took this peek, the only other apps running was Mozilla and Kmail.
The app with a PID of 18536 seems to be the worst CPU hog of the lot. Is it possible something is trying to start up (kdeinit??) another X session or Window and is failing??
Try cross-referenceing top with "ps aux" and see just what apps are associated with all your kdeinit PIDs. Something you don't know about may be re-spawning. Look for dual or multiple entries with different PIDs & try killing them off one-by-one while watching your CPU usage. I once found 3 instances of Netscape running! (That shouldn't happen).
Also, just how much memory and swap space do you have? The reason I ask, is that on another computer I have, I had similar "problems". X, KDE and/or Mozilla just wouldn't run within 64 Megs on it. Strangely GNOME would work quite nicely withing 64 Megs. I was getting a LOT of CPU usage, and consant disk activity BUT the swap usage was nil! Someone mentioned that this "could" be memory page swapping due to a relatively "tight' amount of memory. When I increased the memory to 256 Megs, things settled down and the CPU usage went waaaaay down. The disk activity stopped, and everything worked!