Hi,

On a slackware64 14.1 desktop top shows that X constantly uses 20%+ of the cpu even when the computer is mostly idle. I have seen that this problem has been linked in the past to the nouveau driver or to Terminal, but I am using the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the same behavior is exhibited in eg. xterm, konsole, etc.

Does anyone have any other ideas of what to do about this.

Thanks,
Brian

PS. inactive libreoffice also seems to constantly use nearly 10% of the CPU, but I can close libreoffice, I can't really close X

It may depend on how you are determining it is using 10%...

IF you are running top in the desktop... yes, it will be using 10%, after all, it has to update the display...

IF you are running top in a console terminal, check to see what you have running - a screen saver can easily cause X to use up that much, as can firefox/chrome that may have something active.

Even something as simple as a clock display will cause X to be active.

It seems that firefox was the culprit. So in addition to high cpu usage for the firefox process itself and the dreaded plugin-container processes, but it also drives high usage for the X process? Looks like time to look into alternatives. Is chrome better for that?

Brian

It depends on what the plugin is doing.

What I found was that the )&*(& advertisements are all video/flash based, and the flash player filled the X server with activity... Even when the windows are unmapped, the X server is still given the data... which has to be discarded as the window is unmapped.

And it didn't matter what browser is in use. I use firefox... my wife prefers chrome, yet when her login display is unmapped, chrome is still busy passing data to the flash player, then to the X server...

The I think the flash player just ignores proper X handling (it should know it is unmapped, and then to not bother the X server until it gets a mapped event).

Yes firefox uses allot of rersouces especially the plugins