wtf X using 97% cpu?

[sequser]

Ok, as I mentioned in a previous thread, my machine nuked itself so I started over from a fresh install. I am using Mandrake 8.1. Based on some comments from some people I know, I chose KDE rather than Gnome this time.

Some of the time, everything seems to run ok, but often everything is super slow. Doing anything in the interface (right clicking, dragging a window, opening a menu, etc) will take forever to start happening. Literally 30 seconds or so from right click till when the popup appears.

If I do "top" then I see that the "X" process is using from 90-99% of the cpu. What the hell is going on?

This occurs only when showeq is running, even when EQ is NOT running. IOW, no packets are being decoded, EQ is not running, but the machine is still molassas slow.

If I quit showeq, then X immediately drops off the list. (less than 1% when idle and I cant make it more than about 10% when dragging around a window).

When I compiled qt, I used the j2 option, even though I have no idea what that is.

Thanks in advance.

[Yueh]

That problem has shown up off and on for a long time. Search for 'performance' and you'll find the threads. I don't think anyone has totally nailed it down yet other than to say it is Qt wierdness... but I could be wrong :)

[high_jeeves]

One suggestion was related to hardware acceleration for certain video drivers (dont remember if it was ATI or Nvidia that was having the problem tho.. sorry).. If you are using hardware acceleration (the "accel" flag in your XF86Config file), you might want to try disabling acceleration, and see if this solves your problem.

Searching for "accel" should turn up more information.

--Jeeves

[Yueh]

No TuxRacer while I med!?! Posh! :D

[fryfrog]

i switched to fluxbox (well, and gentoo) and i feel that the problem is a little more under control. i don't see X using 100% cpu much... but i do see it spike every once in a while.

my suggestion would be to see about maybe using something besides kde/gnome. while they LOOK pretty... that prettyness comes at a pretty penny ;)

fluxbox and enlightnment might have a much lighter demand, and my personal suggestion would be for fluxbox :)

[Dedpoet]

Just to add my piece, I also switched to Gentoo (but still use KDE) and I still have this problem to an extent as well. Some things that have seemed to help from most difficult to simplest:

1) Switching to Gentoo from RedHat
2) Changing window managers (I found I still like KDE best though, so I switched back)
3) Compiling my own Qt instead of using RPM's (when I was still on RH)
4) Setting my Radeon card to "noaccel" in my XF86Config file
5) Reducing the size of Seq's window

Surprisingly 5 seems to be the most bang for the buck. I have found a nice balance in my window size between what works well, and what I can comfortably look at for hours on end. This seems to always be an issue with the map. If you turn off the map completely, it's fine. Of course, the map is the main thing I use Seq for, so that's not an option for me. Experiment and see what you come up with, but I think you'll find those items helpful if they apply to you.

-Ded

Edit: I swear this board inserts typos into my text ;)

[JoeBloe]

Also just turning the map off and back on again through the menus 99% of the time makes the problem go away for me until the next few zones.

[S_B_R]

I had this problem before also. I had 2 maps open and docked, 1 zoomed in at 3x and the other was at 1x. I found that if I undocked both maps and then tweaked the size of each (very slight tweaks) I could get X CPU utilization down to normal levels toping out at about 30% (average is prolly 15 - 20%) on a Celeron 400MHz.

Other than this I have tried all the other things mentioned in this thread. Each with little or no effect on overall X CPU usage. The thing that made the biggest difference (excluding the fix above) was using all the switches that Zaphod used (http://seq.sourceforge.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70&highlight=thread) when compiling QT.
./configure -release -shared -gif -xft -sm -system-libmng -system-zlib -system-libpng -system-jpeg -no-g++-exceptions -threadFrom reading the docs on QT I can't figure out why these options make any difference. Especially since most of them are the defaults. But anyway when I used all of those options my average X CPU usage went down from 95%+ to around 75%.