hi, i finished installing debian etch and so far all i have done is install the smp kernel to use my dual core and install the nvidia drivers. i was wondering why when i try to scroll in firefox or try to move a windwo it eats up all of my cpu. when idling both cpus are aourn 1 or 2 but when i try to move anythgn it jumps up to 100 for one of the cpus. everything loads up fast and i have no other problems besides not having sound. any ideas?

Pentium D 805 clccked to 2.66
2 gigs of ram
nvidia 76000gs

Because it does is probably as good an answer as anything else. Scrolling a window isn't a simple task. On my single-processor XP2200+ machine, it takes about 70% of the CPU to scroll firefox when doing nothing else. The CPUs are there to be used. The alternative to using 100% would be slower scrolling, which I assume would not be a good thing. A slow bus or slow memory or a slow video card would all lower the CPU loading, I would think. So, net-net, heavy loading of the CPU to do CPU-intensive tasks probably hints at a system that is well put together from state-of-the art hardware. Did I guess right?

Don't worry, that's normal. I get that too on my AMD64 X2 and on my laptop (P4). You can also experience this on OS X and Windoooos (didn't tried with IE tho).

Browsing the web isn't what it used to be. One way to make it use less ressources is to block ads and flash animation. But in the end if the site is poorly designed, like too many sites, you can't do anything about it.

i dual boot with etch and windows xp. and when i scroll around on xp it never even goes above 10% on either processor

Well i am a debian etch user and I have NOTICED firefox being excessively resource hungry and sometimes unstable , I basically use opera so I can not say that for sure but I have used this firefox 1.5.07 of debian , and quite extensively used firefox 1.5.01 and ff 0.9x (in linux environment) and I do feel taht this version if 1.5.07 in debian etch is resource hungry , you may try upgrading firefox or (downagrading ?) , try another webbrowser or google about it

Try Opera ?

[QUOTE=TurtleFace]hi, i finished installing debian etch and so far all i have done is install the smp kernel to use my dual core and install the nvidia drivers. i was wondering why when i try to scroll in firefox or try to move a windwo it eats up all of my cpu. when idling both cpus are aourn 1 or 2 but when i try to move anythgn it jumps up to 100 for one of the cpus. everything loads up fast and i have no other problems besides not having sound. any ideas?

Pentium D 805 clccked to 2.66
2 gigs of ram
nvidia 76000gs[/QUOTE

Ditto as above except that I have an AMD opteron, hand-built system (by me). I just installed debian etch amd64 on my second HD, to make a dual-boot system. I use Firefox in Windows 2000 all the time without any noticeable lag or drag or scrolling problem or excess (or even noticeable) CPU usage. Firefox is quite fast with my W2K setup - I frequently have one or more system monitor programs going, so I'm not just remembering incorrectly.

I just fired up my notebook (much older Intel PIII system with only a half-gig of RAM) to do a side-by-side comparison - Firefox on old system with W2k, linux running on new blazing fast system (at least under W2k). Where, oh where, oh where is the supposed increase in performance I've been led to expect? How can W2K outperform Linux when Linux is on the new system and W2K is on a comparatively speaking older system?


I am a linux newbie and I am sure that there is something that can be done, that I've done something wrong, configured something incorrectly (I just took all the defaults in installation except that instead of "desktop" and "standard", I just took "standard" and then added a base kde system, to avoid all the bloat in the full desktop installation).

The answer can't be just that Firefox is a resource hog. Maybe so, maybe not. But I have the same problem when all I do is move ANY window in linux, not just Firefox. Scrolling through the package manager window in Linux is like mollases in January. "It just does" eat up CPU cycles is just not a good answer. Moving a window around on a screen may be complex, but it shouldn't be miserably, unuseably slow on an up-to-date system that handles W2K (admittedly a tuned, trimmed W2K, not your usual bloated system) with no problems.

Any enlightenment would be great. Thanks in advance and sorry if I sound a bit frustrated . . .

I'll bet the nvidia driver is to blame, somehow.

I'm using Firefox, too. I found that when I used the nv driver, some webpages (not all) pegged one of my dual CPUs. But the nvidia driver compiled and loaded with module-assistant uses minimal cpu, at normal scrolling speeds.

Are you guys *sure* you're running the right driver? I stopped using the one from Nvidia's site because of endless hassles (wrong gcc version, etc.), and went with the one in the etch repos. Remember, you need glx from the repos, too, the kernel headers, and so on, to compile and install it properly.

Firefox can be seriously speed up by disabling pango.

In firefox directory (in my case, ~/.mozilla/firefox) create file rc, with

MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

SlithyTove exactly pinpointed what was causing my "slow linux high cpu usage" problem (Thank you! SlithyTove). I have an Nvidia GeForce 6600 video card and I was using the wrong video driver - worse than "nv" - I was using "vesa," as that is what was the default from the Etch installation. I had to reconfigure the X11 conf file, or something like that, to use "nv". There were several other problems with the "conf" file, too, that I took care of - it didn't have the right monitor settings, for example. I wish I could find the web pages that pointed me in the right direction, to share with TurtleFace. But I failed to bookmark them. Sorry!

Anyway, now that "vesa" has been replaced by "nv", maybe I should figure out how to replace "nv" with Nvidia, as per SlithyTove's recommendation.

I'm not sure whether installing the actual Nvidia driver from Etch would improve performance in a meaningful way for me, or not. My particular focus is on digital photography, strictly 2D. I've read a few pros and cons about switching to the Nvidia driver, if one isn't going to use the 3D stuff and I don't know enough to make an educated decision, but that might be a topic for another thread.

Fireant - thanks! for the tip about Pango. I don't know what that is, but I will check it out. Under windows I use Proxomitron to filter out CPU-wasting, slow-loading, eye-distracting stuff - alas, at this point I don't know anything at all about how to make things work smoothly and securely under Linux. But I'm learning!