Re: Xorg eats my CPU
On Sunday 08 January 2006 06:21, Kevin Glynn wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am running (up to date) Debian unstable on my laptop, it has a
> Radeon IGP 340M graphics chip. For the last month or so I am seeing
> the Xorg process gradually gobble up more and more CPU, up to 30/40%
> and in some cases 99%.
>
> Even X on its own seems a little sluggish, e.g. when I change windows
> the gnome icons take a fraction of a second to appear in the new
> window.
>
> But the big CPU problems are seen when I run mozilla-firefox, since
> usually when I kill firefox Xorg recovers. I don't see any messages
> in logs that might explain the behaviour and I can't find any related
> bugs filed against Xorg.
>
> Here is the output from the top of top:
>
>
> top - 12:41:40 up 2:56, 4 users, load average: 0.87, 0.45, 0.99
> Tasks: 98 total, 3 running, 95 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 40.7% us, 4.8% sy, 0.1% ni, 52.8% id, 1.2% wa, 0.1% hi, 0.3%
> si Mem: 744112k total, 731812k used, 12300k free, 134736k
> buffers Swap: 997880k total, 108k used, 997772k free, 239776k
> cached
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 13112 keving 17 0 130m 50m 16m R 34.7 7.0 2:04.21 firefox-bin
> 12761 root 5 -10 65052 13m 8108 S 10.1 1.9 1:12.19 Xorg
> 12933 keving 15 0 31756 13m 8596 S 0.2 1.9 0:18.06
> gnome-terminal 12935 keving 15 0 44704 7344 5864 S 0.2 1.0
> 0:02.15 gnome-cups-icon
>
> (Hope that shows up OK)
>
> Does anyone have any idea what bug this might be? Or clues on how I can
> track it down further? I don't really have enough information to file
> a bug report yet ....
>
> Thanks for any advice / help
>
> Kevin
If you've recently upgraded to a 2.6.x kernel, that could be the source of
the problem. The new scheduler doesn't seem to play nicely with X running
at a nice value of -10. So, re-nice X to 0, and see if that fixes your
problem. Search the archives for a method to change the nice value
permanently. Note that for me, re-nicing without restarting X didn't work,
because not all processes showed up in top, and thus I didn't re-nice them.
Hope that helps,
Justin Guerin
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