CPU 100%

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

> In fact the problem seems related to compiz. If i disable desktop
> effects. The computer is usable all the time with compiling.

I have had exactly the same problems - The fact is compiz is not fully mature 
and these sorts of things can occur.

The problem, is compiz/X requires considerably more cpu than a simple X 
session, and when your cpu is overloaded with other things it can start to 
impact on your interactive X performance, as you have seen. 

There are a few things you can try.

A simple thing is to also start any process which is likely to be cpu 
intensive at a high nice value, higher than 0 the default for interactive 
processes. i.e if you normally run 

> foo

instead try

> nice -n 10 foo

which instead will run foo at a nice value of 10.  0 is the highest priority a 
user (other than root) can give a process, and has the highest priority. 19 
is the lowest priority (or most 'nice')

Alternatively, you could try playing with schedtool to give X more priority 
than it normally has. Be careful though not to give it too much priority, 
since it you do your system can really suffer.

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Fedora/2006-10/msg03995.html

cheers Chris