Overheating probably because X eats my CPU on Slackware-current, when I run 'terminal' in XFCE
 

Hi everybuddies,

I run Slackware-current, up to date at time of writing.

on this system:
as soon as I startx under XFCE I have an overheating of my laptop and I get a very slow visual feedback whilst typing in a terminal.

I suspect X being guilty as 'top' says that it use around 100% of the CPU.

But when I use KDE or Fluxbox these symptoms don't appear and X use less than 5% of the CPU.

EDIT This is partially wrong. In fact this seem to occur only if I launch a "terminal" not an "xterm". And X use around 25% of the CPU even in Fluxbox if I launch a terminal. I also noticed that under Fluxbox X use around 50% if I launch 2 "terminal" and 75% if I launch 3 "terminal".

I noticed something very similar in my newly-updated -current installation.

I'm running the nouveau driver, no xorg.conf, and a hyper-threading P4.

Top without X running shows a few percent usage, normal stuff.

Top with X running, using XFCE, shows X getting somewhere around 22% to 25% CPU all the time.

Top, with X running, XFCE, and XFCE Terminal shows 33% to 36% all the time. With the added benefit of typed characters showing about a .5 second lag before showing up. I can type a command and sit back and watch the letters appear.

I didn't have time to test other WM/DEs yet. Thanks for letting me know it isn't just I with the problem!

EDIT: More investigation shows: Running XFCE and htop in terminal, X gets about 33% CPU. Running htop in xterm X gets about 1% to 2% CPU, but mostly 0% CPU. Seems Terminal is the sole culprit. Also, with Terminal and Firefox open flash video goes into "slideshow mode." Close Terminal and video plays normally. Use an xterm and video plays normally.

I've had this with the nouveau driver that comes with Slackware 13.37, and it went away with recent git versions of mesa, libdrm, and the nouveau driver (both kernel and Xorg modules). It's true that it always happens with Terminal and not with xterm. I think it may be the way Terminal renders text, try using a mono font.

@H_TeXMeX_H: I usually use xterm so that's no so big an issue for myself. But I will upgrade some parts of the X stack (though it be pretty up to date in -current) and let know to PV and RW if I come up with good results.

It is happening here too: "/usr/bin/X :0 -auth /home/brz/.serverauth.xxxxx". Without kms I have Terminal using 100% of CPU power. With kms around 49-55%. Current x86_64 (pure), using AMD/ATI open driver and, aside Kernel 3.4.4; the system is pristine -current.

@BrZ: Interesting. So it's not only with the "nouveau" driver. Still I will try to update relevant parts of the X stack but also see what happens with the closed source "nvidia" driver.

I can confirm this aswell on a i5 cpu with integrated intel gpu, at first I thought it was related to i915 module, but after seeing this post and closing Terminal (which unfortunatly I always have running) everything returns to normal. I did strace on Terminal, and there is alot of "POLLIN" going on there, but for now I fixed it by using a different terminal emulator. :^)

terminal using 3% and X using 6% on 64-current with nvidia binary blob. 9-10% load is way too high for just a terminal app. I'm just in the process of running the xfce slackbuild against all the latest updates to see if a rebuild resolves it.

update: nope, if anything it made it use more cpu. I suppose it might be one of the dependencies at fault, or it could be a bug that a rebuild just won't sort out.

Just FYI, there is a problem in kernel's load average calculation with CONFIG_NO_HZ=y https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/22/186. But if your computer is really overheating, it must be something else.

Update: on the #xfce channel on irc.freenode.net I have been told that xfce.4.10 will be included in Slackware 14, so I will wait till it shows in -current's Changelog before looking at that again.

Meanwhile I was told to disable Composite extension with 'xfwm4-tweaks-settings → compositing' and/or disabling the Composite extension in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, or set XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 in my environment prior to starting X. I didn't see very big decrease in CPU usage after that but maybe some of you guys & gals could try as well?

Xfce is fine here, the bug only hit when I open Terminal and, as it eat my CPU, the temperature increase a lot. No problems with xterm and Konsole.

It might be just a bug in Terminal. Either way I'm using a different terminal now (and removed XFCE), so I can't test it.

Built Terminal 4.8 with rworkman script and no more issues. Just changed the doc variable to keep things sane. Current64 is going perfect.

Some updates, firefox and thunderbird are now also doing it :(
When i strace them, they report ALOT of these:

recvfrom(4, 0x7f38e86a9074, 4096, 0, 0, 0) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}], 4, 0) = 0 (Timeout)

Nevermind, this was just that leap second bug, but strace still shows above mentioned errors, any ideas on that one?

I'm running into something similar. I hadn't noticed the extra CPU usage until I looked for it. Mainly I noticed that keeping the XFCE Terminal open would cause it to continue to use more and more RAM. It increases slowly but I left it up for a few days at one point and it ate up around 8gb until I closed it.

The CPU thing was a bit odd actually. I opened a konsole and a Terminal window. If I run top in the konsole window, everything looks normal. Run top in the Terminal and X jumps to 50% CPU usage and stays that way for a minute or so after quitting top. I tried turning off compositing and setting a solid background in the preferences for Terminal. That didn't seem to have any effect. It doesn't appear that text updates in Terminal have anything to do with it as I do not get the same behavior when using less and scrolling through a large file. That's about all I have, not sure where to look from there. I'll probably continue using konsole for a few days then build Terminal 4.8 using the links above (thanks for that BTW).