100% CPU used by X when doing almost nothing [solved]

[dlublink]

Hello,

Since a few days it seems that X uses between 60 and 100% of my cpu when I simply open firefox and open a website. I open top, and top takes 100%...

What's going on?? I haven't upgraded my kernel since 2.6.19-r5. It only started in the past day or to.

When I type 'clear' in gnome-terminal, it takes about 5 seconds to clear my terminal!!

What is going on? I tried using top to determine who is taking up the CPU but it varies depending on which application is running.

I type 'eix' and it takes like 30 seconds to display the list that once took 1 second to display.

If I switch to tty1 (alt+f1) and run eix it works fine. It seems to only do this behavior when I am in graphic mode.

Therefore I thought that it might be my video card, so I ran GLXGears. It runs very smoothly at about 320-350 FPS. So I don't think that the problem is with the graphics card.

I checked xorg-server and it looks like it was recently recompiled. Could there be something that changed signifcantly in xorg?

Anyone have any idea what's going on with my computer?

Thanks,

David

[germanobax]

I gess you have Beagle indexing your files. It does that when the computer goes idle.
_________________
Life is a Sexually Transmitted Disease, with 100% mortality.

[dlublink]

[quote="germanobax"]I gess you have Beagle indexing your files. It does that when the computer goes idle.[/quote]

Beagle is not installed on my computer.

[code] 5171 root 19 0 135m 27m 10m R [b]89.0[/b] 11.0 3:42.71 X
5563 david 16 0 180m 62m 26m S 1.3 24.8 0:51.50 firefox-bin
5263 david 15 0 15448 8500 7168 S 1.0 3.3 0:02.86 metacity
5637 root 15 0 2204 1096 848 R 0.7 0.4 0:00.14 top
5274 david 15 0 47676 17m 10m S 0.3 7.1 0:03.40 gnome-terminal
1 root 15 0 1568 548 472 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.50 init [/code]

Here we see that X is using 89% of my processor. I am running firefox and a terminal window with top.

Nothing else!

[code]compaq david # eix beagle
* app-misc/beagle
Available versions: 0.2.16 0.2.16.2
Homepage: http://www.beagle-project.org/
Description: search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for

* sci-libs/beagle
Available versions: 2.2.0 ~3.0.1
Homepage: http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/index.html
Description: Open BEAGLE, a versatile EC/GA/GP framework

* sys-fs/beaglefs
Available versions: ~1.0.3
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/fuse/beaglefs/
Description: beaglefs implements a filesystem representing a live Beagle query.

Found 3 matches.
[/code]

Any other ideas?

David

[dlublink]

Alright, I may have found the cause of the solution. I disabled transparency on my gnome-terminal, and now it doesn't take 100% processor.

Funny thing is that it used to work fine on my computer. GLXGears works great (320 fps). Why would transparency suddenly stop working?

[xavier10]

Seems like you are not alone getting such problems, with X taking much more CPU than it should:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-556832.html

This bugs me more and more... My laptop was very silent and now the fan is running most of the time.

[Duke42]

Well, on my system, it helped to use Luxi Serif instead of Times... It seems to me, something in the font renderer is broken.

[Udasai]

320 fps in glxgears is great? I get 12000+ (NVidia 6800GS, proprietary driver).

[dlublink]

[xavier10]

In my case it really seems to be made much worse when browsing some website... Today, X peaked around 100% cpu, and firefox went very slow, just to scroll a page which was fine before. My laptop is really not as it was before...

I noticed some errors in my xorg.conf, which I will try to investigate now (the drm thing should not be the issue: this has been broken for some time, due to cr@ppy ATI drivers):

[dlublink]

[xavier10]

I disabled DRI completely now and get a faster X server. Again, desktop changes are instantaneous, and same for actions on firefox.
The fan of the laptop still often runs faster than it used to be.

Overall, I am pleased though.