Xorg CPU hog?

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Sanjima

Xorg CPU hog?

Post by Sanjima »

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/330/wtfxorg.png

Would anyone by chance know why Xorg is taking so many CPU cycles? It didn't start doing it 'till kind of recently.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
lagagnon

Re: Xorg CPU hog?

Post by lagagnon »

Basically you do not have enough RAM for the fancy graphical desktop you are attempting to run there. If you look at your top output you can see you have maxed out RAM and are already using a considerable amount of swap memory. I am amazed you can stand it - your machine must be chugging along rather slowly. I suggest you either: 1) pony up and buy some more RAM or, 2) turn off all the fancy graphical eye-candy.
Sanjima

Re: Xorg CPU hog?

Post by Sanjima »

My machine is actually running quite smoothly, save for the stolen CPU cycles by Xorg. If I turn off the on-demand CPU frequency scaling, it uses about 9% on my 1.5GHz mobile intel processor. I realize I don't have much ram, but I'm not exactly bursting with cash either. All I want to know is why Xorg is hogging my processor so much.

Also, I'm barely using 15MB of swap memory. How is that a "considerable amount"?

edit: Never mind. I turned off gnome compositing and turned compiz back on, and now it's fine and running smooth again. I thought I'd try the compositing instead of compiz thinking it would be lighter on my system but that was a bit of a joke. Thanks for the help.
lagagnon

Re: Xorg CPU hog?

Post by lagagnon »

Sanjima wrote:All I want to know is why Xorg is hogging my processor so much.
Also, I'm barely using 15MB of swap memory. How is that a "considerable amount"?
Any time you start using swap you basically do not have enough RAM in your system for what you are attempting to do. I suspect Xorg is swapping on you because of all the fancy stuff on your desktop, and thus using more CPU cycles to do so....

RAM is cheaper than it has ever been in history - you can buy 1GB chips for $25 on sale these days....
Sanjima

Re: Xorg CPU hog?

Post by Sanjima »

A 1GB stick of ram for my particular laptop is $18 from Newegg, regular price. I still don't have money for it though, I have more important things to do.

Also, I disagree with what you said about when the system starts using swap. My desktop computer has 1GB of ram and usually never goes above 40%, and yet I -still- found the swap being used on occasion, about 15MB of it just like my laptop. In response I turned the swap function off entirely, as it got a bit annoying. And I haven't had a problem since.

On my laptop, I have vm.swappiness set to 10, and that seems to work just fine. It rarely tends to swap, and using the swap does not use more CPU cycles. It only takes longer for things to load that are in the swap. That's all.

edit: Also, all of my fancy graphical eye-candy uses less than 10MB of ram collectively. I don't think turning that off will make much of a difference.
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