Running with the brakes on ...

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 02:13 -0500, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

> When running top, I see that X is consuming 40% of memory which is not
> surprising since I am running two X sessions with 3200x1200 (dual
> head, radeon, open source) along with long running firefox,
> thunderbird and VNC (also 3200x1200) apps).  But when I bring up the
> Soundcard Detection tool under KDE top shows Xorg is consistently
> grabbing 93% of the CPU even when all I am doing is typing this
> message.  That would certainly explain a lot of the lag in response to
> mouse clicks from the app. :-)  Switching to Gnome and running top
> there shows varying, but high (60%ish) CPU use with the Soundcard
> Detection tool still running in both sessions.  But with Gnome,
> response to mousee clicks is fine, even with the high X CPU use.

So you've found that some use profile makes X use all the CPU.  Now you
need to find out _what_ in X is taking all the time.  You need to either
use a tool like oprofile or sysprof to extract that information, or you
need to instrument the X server to report on what requests and clients
are using most of its time.  The latter requires code changes to a
project that many people find intimidating and/or unpleasant to work
with, which is why I suggested using oprofile in the first place.

- ajax