why X window process consume 15% CPU utilization?

paomo · 06-26-2006, 04:48 AM

I just installed RHEL AS 4.0 on a opteron system, and try to check the system status with a "top" command. Surprisingly, a process named "X" consumed 15% of CPU resource, even when the system is doing nothing.
I tried the same "top" command in a system installed with RHEL WS 2.1, the "X" process consume only 1% CPU resource.
I'm wondering what's going on here, how can I reduce the workload of CPU?
any help is greatly appreciated.

Gethyn · 06-26-2006, 05:16 AM

X is the graphical windows frontend. If you want it to use less CPU, you can either try running in text mode, or use a different window manager. KDE is the most demanding on the system, followed by Gnome. Lighter weight windows managers include XFCE, fluxbox and icewm.

Bruce Hill · 06-26-2006, 05:22 AM

I don't think running KDE is the culprit. I'm running KDE, along with some pretty heavy resource leechers, such as QEMU, and look at my top output:

Code:

Tasks:  88 total,   3 running,  85 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.3% us,  0.3% sy,  0.0% ni, 98.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.3% si
Mem:   2076412k total,  2001188k used,    75224k free,   128764k buffers
Swap:   995948k total,        0k used,   995948k free,  1517512k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
17276 mingdao   15   0 1076m 1.0g 1.0g R  1.0 52.3   9:13.72 qemu
 3839 mingdao   15   0 23276 7972 6060 S  0.7  0.4   2:34.35 gkrellm
 3750 root      15   0  102m  77m  14m S  0.3  3.8   7:17.03 X

So I think it's something else...

Have you checked "top" and also "ps -aux" for running processes?

paomo · 06-26-2006, 12:11 PM

hi, guys, thanks for all the help. I just select both KDE and GNORM as default desktop, the GNORM will consume more CPU resource than KDE (10% vs 6%), however, this is still too high compare to your system.
The new system I have, is a MSI dual-opteron server board, which has an integrated ATI rage graphic controller with 4M(or 8M) RAM, I didn't buy a stand-alone graphic card for it. Not sure if this could drag more CPU resource for display?