The X.org, NVidia & KWin Situation

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

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I'm no expert whatsoever, but we can at least try to narrow down the problem.

Does this only occur with the nVidia driver or also with the nouveaux, nv and vesa drivers?

#1 Quintesse on 2010-07-12 14:51 (Reply)

+1

try nouveau and vesa (not nv, this one is just too slow and bad)

if you dont experience the problems with that drivers, you know whos the faulty

Second: Disable the Desktop Effects!!! If it seems you have a problem with them, dont disable plugins or change the render, disable it completely (or do you need it for you daily work at computer? i bet not)

so after you found out that its mostly nvidias fault you should start to write them an letter how bad they are

#1.1 Vamp898 (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 14:58 (Reply)

I had a similar problem on my gentoo box using x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-195.36.24. All become sluggish. But after downgrading to x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-190.53-r1 everything goes smoothly again.
But this does only occur on the GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 not on my GeForce 250GTS.

#2 Alexander on 2010-07-12 14:56 (Reply)

Same here. i found that using the nouveau driver helps a lot, but that might not be an option for everybody

#3 Beat Wolf on 2010-07-12 14:59 (Reply)

I have experienced similar behavior on gentoo & kde4 with mumble (gaming voip client). Closing mumble and killing kwin did help, I'm thus convinced it's a kwin problem, but somehow triggered by mumble (and possibly by others). Strange thing is that mumble itself was doing just fine, and CPU chewing occurred only occasionally, sometimes right after mumble was started, sometimes after a longer while. Mumble uses Qt4 but not kde libs.

#4 radon on 2010-07-12 15:11 (Reply)

Yes, I've tried the nouveau driver and - at least with desktop effects enabled - I do experience the same issue, even though to a slightly less extent.

I'll try disabling desktop effects all together.

#5 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 15:12 (Reply)

I found a similar slowdown but tracked it down to firefox. As soon as I quit firefox the desktop is smooth as silk again. The longer I have firefox running, the laggier things seem to get. This is with the latest 3.6.6 firefox I even built it from scratch to see if it helped, which it did not. I wonder if the gtk-qt theme engine might be responsible?

#6 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 15:15 (Reply)

Indeed on first testing, uninstalling the gtk-qt theme engine package has resolved the slowdown, but I would need to run it for longer to be sure.

#6.1 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 15:18 (Reply)

Nope, after a while the lag returned, so it's not the gtk-qt theme. However, the one consistent thing I've found is quitting firefox makes the lag instantly go away.

#6.1.1 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 16:19 (Reply)

If closing firefox fixes the problem then I am liable to suspect the flash plugin as the culprit.

#6.1.1.1 Danni Coy on 2010-07-12 18:22 (Reply)

This is without the flash plugin...

#6.1.1.2 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 10:32 (Reply)

New datapoint: When I do get the lag, it goes away only when I quit firefox normally. However, I tried various things once I got the lag to see if it would go away without closing firefox, and found that if I shade and unshade the firefox windows the lag goes away. No idea what this means exactly.

#6.1.1.2.1 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-16 16:53 (Reply)

I can had the same problem with a 8400M. With the binary driver after a couple of hours of use its becomes unusable. If I just leave it running for 12 hours without using it it's fine but will become unusable again after a couple of hours of use.

The nouveau driver is great and feels so much quicker but crashes within 10 minutes guaranteed. With dual screen it crashes even quicker.

I am now using nv single screen which feels quicker than the binary driver except for yakuake animation which is really slow.

I haven't tried the vesa driver, I'll give that a go.

#7 Nick on 2010-07-12 15:17 (Reply)

after having problems with X.org freezing randomly under load i found out that setting the PowerMizer setting to prefer maximum performance solved the problem, maybe your problem is similar

#8 lord rel on 2010-07-12 15:31 (Reply)

Could you please track this down and post a new blog entry if you figured out what the problem is? thank you (i also see a huge memory leak with the nvidia driver, xorg usually ends up using 500MB of ram.

#9 Beat Wolf on 2010-07-12 15:37 (Reply)

I certainly hope we can track it down once and for all. I'll make sure to post an update whenever I got some news.

This one just needs to be fixed desperately.

#9.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 15:44 (Reply)

For me, the one thing that slowed everything down was some krunner plugin. Not sure which one though, I just disabled almost all of them, and the problem went away.

#10 Svempa on 2010-07-12 15:37 (Reply)

This looks like a related bug report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234463

#11 conman (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 16:22 (Reply)

Running two nvidia cards in xinerama mode with nvidia drivers.
I found that a ctrl-alt-F1 and back to X, without a full logout&login, brings back the system to acceptable responsivness.

Next time I'll try nouveau drivers, since they argue to be ready to drive multiple cards.

#12 GOo on 2010-07-12 16:27 (Reply)

I too feel the same problem.After some time , the memory needed will peak to about 700 to 900MB and CPU usage about 60% . I didn't report a bug because I couldn't find to which section I should report a bug . If you reported a bug, I shall vote it up

#13 Praveesh K P on 2010-07-12 17:17 (Reply)

I do not think it a problem with NVIDIA driver because the Gnome(in ubuntu) works very fine with the same driver .Of course with desktop effects enabled .No problems like this .

#14 Praveesh on 2010-07-12 17:23 (Reply)

Confirmed.

#14.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 17:35 (Reply)

Having said that, it still might be the NVidia driver, but only KWin seems to trigger the issue. God knows, so far.

#14.2 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-12 17:36 (Reply)

I have a intel X3100 and after some time (nearly 2 hours) everything is sluggish. However, if I use kde apps in gnome, the same thing does not happen.

(Sorry for my english)

#14.3 Andre on 2010-07-12 18:07 (Reply)

There have been problems in the past with bad NVidia support for some of the more advanced Xorg features that KDE was using. So even if gnome doesn't have the problem, it may just be because KDE uses more advanced parts of Xorg that should be supported but which Nvidia has been very slow to fix problems with (compared to Intel and ATI). They were even very slow to even admit the problem existed (which is also not unusual for Nvidia).

#14.4 TheBlackCat on 2010-07-12 19:25 (Reply)

Hi,

I have the problem after upgrading to KDE SC 4.5RC1 but all the effects work fine with the same driver (nvidia binary) on the same system but with KDE SC 4.4 !

#15 Amine27 on 2010-07-12 18:04 (Reply)

Hi

I've got a similar problem, but I'm using open source radeon driver. I did a simple test - opened smplayer, loaded a movie, ran htop and moved dolphin over smplayer. Xorg usage was very high when using Kwin effects:

http://www.image-share.com/ipng-296-274.html

then, I installed compiz-fusion and repeated the test. I don't have a screenshot (I can do one if someone's interested), but overall CPU usage was about 25% compared to 74% using kwin! I'm not sure it's kwin fault, because open source radeon developers are mainly from Red Hat (afaik) and they're gnome fanboys, so it's possible driver is optimized for compiz which is used on gnome and thus on RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu... Another thing which suggests drivers are optimized for gnome is wayland server which doesn't support Qt at all! Maybe it is a good idea to fill a bug report somewhere?

#16 Pawel on 2010-07-12 19:03 (Reply)

I had this problem for a long time, but it seems fixed for me with 256.xx drivers. My xorg CPU usage doesn't seem to get over 10% now, even after days. Firefox still makes my computer really sluggish, but that doesn't seem to be reflected in higher xorg CPU usage.

#17 TheBlackCat on 2010-07-12 19:35 (Reply)

I suffer from this from time to time. I haven't fully tracked it down, but it seems some combination of the following fixes it:
Use Plastik window decoration instead of Oxygen
Disable caching thumbnails in Desktop Effects advanced
Disable effects using thumbnails (such as showing window contents in taskmanager)
Disable direct rendering
* Avoid hidden tabs with animations (multiple tabs, if not shown tab is animating, things start to crawl)

#18 Carewolf on 2010-07-12 20:31 (Reply)

Does this sound like your problem? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178269

I was having that problem, and as you can read on the bug report, two things fixed it for me. 1. Disabling XSYNC extension in Kwin. 2. Upgrading to latest KDE 4.5 beta, version 4.4.92.

#19 Ryan on 2010-07-12 20:38 (Reply)

I, too, have this problem with nvidia. I thought it had to do with the XRender extension that I am using because of the black window problem (out of video ram?) with OpenGL.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198410

But turning of effects is making things worse, because the windows and window decorations take so much time to redraw on desktop switches. If you compare this to e.g. openbox or icewm, other window managers are much faster.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204699

I am waiting for the day when reading about the one important configuration trick that is missing in debian/sid or something. Also I had the hope that this problem does not exist with intel onboard graphics what I would choose for my next PC. But as some reported above, intel does have the problem, too!?

#20 Gert on 2010-07-12 22:08 (Reply)

You guys just describe the issue am having with kde on my Intel GM965 on gnome compiz everything is ok (not great but ok) but on kde after using the system for a while and opening many windows. The system start to slow to a crawl. If this is a bug with the drivers and kwin is just exposing this bug then I think we need to identify what the bug is and inform the Intel (your graphic card here) guys cus at the end it all falls back to kde in the mind of the average user.

#21 bigbrovar (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 01:21 (Reply)

I noticed that with distribution using fast boot + plymouth and gdm/kdm integration, the isue could arise because plymouth was not release tty7. Starting X on tty8 solve the issue.

To give a shot, start in CLI mode, do a startx, and see if the problem still occurs at some time

#22 FACORAT Fabrice (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 01:54 (Reply)

Certainly worth a shot, even though I have been suffering from this issue even on Ubuntu 9.xx.

#22.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 03:19 (Reply)

Have you tried updating the bios? I had similar problem with a GeForce 8500 GT, and a bios update solved the problem.

#23 simon on 2010-07-13 03:32 (Reply)

There is definitely a bottleneck in KDE 4.5 RC2...

Here (GF 9800, up to date nvidia drivers, Ubuntu), kwin eats most of my CPU when playing a video or a game... (even with VLC 1.1, when a HD video is... PAUSED !!)

The FPS in my games seem to be halved...

#24 T_U on 2010-07-13 05:20 (Reply)

Some more data : I get some significantly better performance when disabling at the same time :

- vsync
- blur effect
- slide effect (when changing virtual desktops)

Then the cpu usage of kwin is much lower and animation is smooth again...

#24.1 T_U on 2010-07-13 06:08 (Reply)

Dunno if this will help, or why this helped me, but after upgrading to kde 4.5rc1 I had the same issue. I removed the .kde dir in my homedirectory and restarted X.

All the issues went away for me. hopefully this helps.

#25 Andrew on 2010-07-13 08:38 (Reply)

Nope, at least not in my case. I even installed Kubuntu on a completely fresh machine and I'm running into this issue instantly. Without tweaking any settings or anything. Bog standard installation...

#25.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 08:59 (Reply)

blur effect seems to have been causing the problem for me.

I guess, the blurring algorithm is not efficient.

#26 fast_rizwaan (Homepage) on 2010-07-13 10:24 (Reply)

I have the same issue too, on Kubuntu 10.04, with Intel GM965/GL960. Desktop effects are unusable after a few minutes of use. Firefox is often an issue, I sometimes do killall -STOP firefox-bin when I'm not using it. 2 years ago or so Compiz and Kubuntu 8.04 worked smoothly on the same machine.

Glad to know I'm not the only one!

#27 P on 2010-07-13 11:31 (Reply)

I have a similar problem with my Intel GM965, sometimes I can fix it by restarting plasma and kwin:

kquitapp plasma-desktop
sleep 10
plasma-desktop
sleep 10
kwin --replace&

It specially happens after resume from ram of after several minutes of usage (specially with firefox also)

#28 lomillor on 2010-07-13 15:17 (Reply)

I have also been experiencing issues like this. I am currently running KDE 4.5 rc2 on Kubuntu 10.04 amd64. My observations thus far are that something is leaking memory causing my system to start using swap, which really bogs down the machine. When I first boot, the system uses maybe 700mb of RAM. I start kontact, firefox, some konsoles, kate, and kopete. That brings me up to around 1gig of RAM, but after some hours of usage it goes up to 1.5+ gigs of RAM even though I haven't started any new apps. Looking at the System Monitor, I cannot account for the RAM usage. The filesystem cache only makes up maybe 500 megs of RAM. Even looking through htop I cannot account for the memory usage. But I have also experienced the CPU usage issue where both X and Kwin start chewing up CPU. There is definitely a regression here, I have just been unable to pinpoint it in order to submit a proper bug report. Hopefully someone out there will figure this out.

#29 Craig on 2010-07-13 21:06 (Reply)

I have similar situation on GNOME-SHELL. In difference, KDE4 will hang-up my system by time to tine(but CPU usage isn't big).

My xorg version is 7.5-11.3 on OpenSUSE 11.3.

#30 Lachu on 2010-07-14 15:07 (Reply)

I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?

#31 pelipas (Homepage) on 2010-07-14 19:14 (Reply)

Sure, go ahead and quote me. My twitter account is "mueslix", but I barely use it whatsoever.

#31.1 muesli (Homepage) on 2010-07-14 19:31 (Reply)

it was very interesting to read.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?

#32 rudometov (Homepage) on 2010-07-19 00:39 (Reply)

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