Plasma on KDE 4.1/Kubuntu 8.10: High CPU Usage

[buddha001]

Just upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10/Intrepid. Everything went smoothly, but I've now noticed that Plasma is using up my entire cpu - 80+% cpu usage and it progressively gets worse the longer I keep it running. At some point I can't even switch programs, it's just frozen. I've removed all desktop plasmoids and pretty much only have the taskbar running.

Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas how to solve this?

[inobe]

open terminal and type top then hit enter.

locate what is using that amount and post back

[freedom]

Same here....
KDE 4.1.3
plasma and Xorg uses together 90% CPU... :confused:
plasma alone around 60% and it is same with or without plasmoids and with composite effects enabled or disabled.
GPU is ATI HD 2600 and driver is latest fglrx from repo.
Does anyone have an idea?

[quicklearner]

I am having the same problem.
But its kwin.
Here is my top result.


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6592 root 20 0 480m 92m 6700 R 24 2.3 9:08.56 Xorg
7306 shiplu 20 0 61956 20m 14m R 13 0.5 3:55.09 kwin
7883 shiplu 20 0 251m 120m 28m S 9 3.0 1:03.04 firefox
7735 shiplu 20 0 224m 87m 27m S 1 2.2 0:37.05 xulrunner-bin
7326 shiplu 20 0 49660 8556 7084 S 0 0.2 0:00.24 kaccess
7503 shiplu 20 0 27864 8724 6616 S 0 0.2 0:00.28 kded
8005 shiplu 20 0 118m 23m 15m S 0 0.6 0:01.17 konsole
1 root 20 0 3056 1900 576 S 0 0.0 0:01.25 init

[schnelle]

I had these problems and I solved them by installing Kubuntu 9.10 and KDE 4.3 :) . Kde 4.1 (even 4.2) is an alpha release compared to Kde 4.3.

[gunksta]

I agree, especially on older ATI hardware where you can no longer use the proprietary drivers - newer versions of KDE are your friend. Plasma makes use of some nice blending affects and translucency affects that exposed many weaknesses in older drivers, which can cause your CPU usage to spike --- and stay there.

If upgrading is not an option, I would recommend installing the XFCE desktop. I had to use XFCE as my primary desktop on an older laptop during the KDE 4.0-4.2 days because of the driver problems under Plasma. I used the XFCE desktop, but continued to use all of my favorite KDE applications, because they continued to work just fine.

With KDE 4.3, this is no longer necessary on this older computer with ancient ATI hardware.

[quicklearner]

I have disabled the plasma. But after few days, The problem starts again.
:(



PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6805 root 20 0 410m 65m 5568 R 62 1.6 17:20.58 Xorg
8680 shiplu 20 0 223m 92m 23m R 40 2.3 10:52.05 xulrunner-bin
8823 shiplu 20 0 174m 75m 20m S 2 1.9 0:16.42 xulrunner-bin
8935 shiplu 20 0 190m 59m 27m R 2 1.5 0:25.18 amarokapp

[gunksta]

It's not clear to me what's going on here (outside of the rather depressing CPU usage shown in your previous post).

Are you still running 8.10? If so -- this is your problem. I hate to be this blunt about it, but the first few releases of KDE 4 were full of problems like this.

Upgrade to Karmic, or accept that you are going to burn a whole in your mobo if you fan fails. There's nothing anyone here can do about it.

If you are running Karmic, then this is definitely an issue that warrants further investigation.

It just occurred to me that there is a small work-around you could try. Install XFCE and log into the XFCE desktop. Don't install Xubuntu unless you want to pull in a bunch of unnecessary dependencies like Thunderbird and what not. You just need the desktop. Look through Synaptic and install only what seems necessary. If you need help doing this, let me know and I'll post an apt-get command here for you to use.

XFCE has a Window manager than includes BASIC (super BASIC) compositing. Log into the XFCE Desktop and activate this compositing. XFCE has a control-center like thing and look around under Windows Manager or something to find this. It may be activated by default, I'm not sure. I haven't used XFCE since 8.10. If you CPU usage skyrockets while using the XFCE compositor, part of your problem is a crappy driver for your video card, which may or may not be improved by updating to Karmic.

If it's really just Plasma - XFCE should NOT trigger high CPU usage.

Also remember that many problems under KDE 4.0-4.1 also had to do with KWin. Make sure you have disabled the Dekstop Affects. Turning off Plasma will NOT disable the desktop affects, since they are part of KWin, not Plasma and these could be eating up your CPU cycles too.

Have I mentioned that you should really NOT use 8.10 anymore?

[gunksta]

It also looks like you are running xul-runner with some application that is causing problems too. 40% CPU usage for xul-runner looks like a problem to me too.

[quicklearner]

It also looks like you are running xul-runner with some application that is causing problems too. 40% CPU usage for xul-runner looks like a problem to me too.
May be.

I disabled plasma and all desktop effects when I first encounter this problem(24% cpu). Then It become normal for some days. Then suddenly I saw the problem (62% cpu) again.

2 days ago, I got an update. It was an update on xu-lrunner and firefox stuff. Now I dont see any high cpu usage.

Lets see if It starts again.
.