There is bound to be many reasons for high CPU usage at idle but I thought sharing my experience here which may benefit others.
I was running Lubuntu 18.04 on a Pentium D processor with 4GB RAM and recently noticed extremely slow response on Firefox, specially playing video. I then tried to play a video file on VLC with similar issues. I also noticed that my CPU utilization was running over 50% constantly - even at idle time. Initially, I suspected my SSD drive so removed it and replaced with a normal SATA drive but there was no change in the performance.
Then I noticed that the CPU cooler was covered with a fair amount of fluff. So I pulled out the cooler unit gave it a good clean up and re-installed the unit. Rebooted system and voila! the idle CPU rate went down to below 5%.
While there could be many other reasons for running at high idle CPU usage this certainly surprised me and something to keep in mind when having problems like this. Just a word of caution, if you are pulling out the cooling unit for cleaning make sure that you have sufficient thermal paste which is required when you are putting it back.
Sharing this so that this possibility can be ruled out when troubleshooting high CPU utilization problems.
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