Posted by muesli in
KDE
Monday, July 12. 2010
For months and months now, my Linux Desktop is suffering from one particular issue, which makes it a pain to use on a daily basis: After having it running for a few hours, suddenly X.org and KWin go bonkers and start eating up all my cpu horse-power.
It's not uncommon to see X.org spiking up to a whopping 60% CPU usage, followed by KWin using roughly another 25%.
Since I'm suffering from this issue now ever since I switched to KDE 4, I thought it's time to turn to you fellow KDE developers for some good advice, since all my undertakings to resolve the issue have failed:
I have tried to switch to a different / newer graphics card, experimented with various versions of the NVidia driver and tweaked X.org settings, have turned off various desktop effect plugins, switched between XRender and OpenGL, even re-installed Kubuntu on a new machine.
No dice, though... after it's been running for a few hours my desktop is completely unusable. Every mouse or keyboard action becomes sluggish, scrolling through lists takes ages and logging out from my KDE session up to two minutes (which is the only known way to resolve the situation, giving me another six hours or so, before I'll have to repeat that routine).
From talking on IRC, forums and a bit of googling I know that I'm not the only one who's having this problem. So I'm curious if anyone has experienced the issue and gained some insight as to what's actually going on. I'd be happy to know.
Update on July, 13th:
Still investigating and collecting data to figure out what's going on. Since I wrote this blog entry originally, my system suffered from terrible slowdowns twice more. In both cases X.org and KWin instantly stopped utilizing my CPU when I closed all GTK-based apps. (e.g. Firefox, Chromium, Pan, Gimp, ...)
At least this is some progress, even though I still don't know what might possibly be causing this. Running a pure Gnome installation, I've never experienced those issues.
Thanks,
Chris
