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#1 2010-05-06 12:10:29
- Paul-S
- Member
- From: Wales
- Registered: 2008-02-04
- Posts: 353
XMonad High Cpu Usage
Hi all, I've been running XMonad for a couple of years and love it, on a desktop pc, AMD phenom 9950 with 4 gigs of ram.
It runs great and after a lot of messing around I've got a setup I really like, but lately 90% of my time is spent on an old laptop 1.4ghz 1 gig ram and after logging into XMonad the cpu sits at 30% usage. htop doesn't show anything obvious, X uses about 7% cpu. Using xorg 1.8 but it was the same with 1.7.
So instead I've been using 2wm or dwm they normally sit around 4%-8% cpu.
I've tried stripping the xmonad.hs of everything I don't need, using a very simple config and no statusbar of any kind and the cpu is still around 30%.
I start all wm's the same way with the same daemons running, tried using the official release and downloading from darcs with the same result, just wondering if anybodys come across something similar and found anyway of fixing it.
Cheers
Paul-S
Last edited by Paul-S (2010-05-06 12:11:47)
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#2 2010-05-06 13:48:24
- raf_kig
- Member
- Registered: 2008-11-28
- Posts: 143
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
What does powertop say? XMonad shouldn't create any CPU usage while idling.
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#3 2010-05-06 14:26:01
- lifeafter2am
- Member
- From: 127.0.0.1
- Registered: 2009-06-10
- Posts: 1,332
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
I run it on my 1.6Ghz netbook with no problems. The cpu is downclocked to 800Mhz most of the time and my idle is still only at 1%-4%. That's definitely some strange behavior.
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#5 2010-05-06 15:01:41
- Paul-S
- Member
- From: Wales
- Registered: 2008-02-04
- Posts: 353
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
Heres my powertop output
PowerTOP 1.11 (C) 2007, 2008 Intel Corporation
Collecting data for 15 seconds
Cn Avg residency
C0 (cpu running) (31.7%)
polling 0.0ms ( 0.0%)
C1 halt 0.0ms ( 0.0%)
C2 0.3ms ( 0.1%)
C3 9.1ms (68.2%)
P-states (frequencies)
Wakeups-from-idle per second : 77.8 interval: 15.0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 21.4W (1.1 hours)
Top causes for wakeups:
56.1% (130.4) <kernel core> : hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer)
9.7% ( 22.5) cat : acpi_ec_transaction_unlocked (process_timeout)
8.6% ( 19.9) <interrupt> : ata_piix
7.5% ( 17.4) <interrupt> : ipw2200
5.2% ( 12.0) cat : schedule_timeout_uninterruptible (process_timeout)
4.2% ( 9.7) <kernel core> : hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
1.3% ( 3.1) <interrupt> : i915
1.3% ( 3.1) urxvt : sys_epoll_wait (process_timeout)
0.9% ( 2.1) <kernel core> : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.8% ( 1.8) X : i915_add_request (i915_hangcheck_elapsed)
0.7% ( 1.7) sleep : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.4% ( 1.0) <kernel core> : sk_reset_timer (tcp_delack_timer)
0.4% ( 0.9) X : hrtimer_start (it_real_fn)
0.4% ( 0.9) X : queue_delayed_work (delayed_work_timer_fn)
0.3% ( 0.7) feh : blk_plug_device (blk_unplug_timeout)
0.2% ( 0.5) <interrupt> : eth0
0.2% ( 0.5) feh : e100_watchdog (e100_watchdog)
0.2% ( 0.5) offlineimap : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.2% ( 0.5) ipw2200/0 : queue_delayed_work (delayed_work_timer_fn)
0.2% ( 0.5) conky : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.1% ( 0.3) feh : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.1% ( 0.3) chromium : sys_epoll_wait (process_timeout)
0.1% ( 0.3) thunar : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.1% ( 0.3) offlineimap : sk_reset_timer (tcp_write_timer)
0.1% ( 0.2) init : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.1% ( 0.2) wicd-monitor : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.1% ( 0.2) offlineimap : blk_plug_device (blk_unplug_timeout)
0.1% ( 0.1) chromium : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.1% ( 0.1) X : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) <interrupt> : PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad
0.0% ( 0.1) X : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.0% ( 0.1) events/0 : queue_delayed_work (delayed_work_timer_fn)
0.0% ( 0.1) crond : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.0% ( 0.1) setxkbmap : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) xkbcomp : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) sleep : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) kblockd/0 : blk_add_timer (blk_rq_timed_out_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) battery : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) cut : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)
0.0% ( 0.1) sh : cfq_completed_request (cfq_idle_slice_timer)Offline
#6 2010-05-16 08:43:03
- Paul-S
- Member
- From: Wales
- Registered: 2008-02-04
- Posts: 353
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
Installing gdm and using that to control the login fixed my high cpu usage.
Running from startx or slim gave me an idling use of 30%, gdm give me an idling cpu use of 4%.
Doesn't make sense that the supposedly heavier option should be lighter on the cpu, but it work for me 
Cheers
Paul-S
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#7 2010-05-16 12:13:50
- Mr.Elendig
- #archlinux@freenode channel op
- From: The intertubes
- Registered: 2004-11-07
- Posts: 4,092
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
sounds like you have something nasty in your xinitrc then.
For reference, xmonad almost never goes over 0.2% on my q6600
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#8 2010-05-16 13:08:51
- Paul-S
- Member
- From: Wales
- Registered: 2008-02-04
- Posts: 353
Re: XMonad High Cpu Usage
Yeah weird thing is though my .xinitrc just had a list of start scripts for xmonad, dwm, 2wm etc and all the scripts were identical,
except for the wm being started, so I thought maybe it was something Arch related, common sense
says its obviously not.
So I installed Debian and cpu use was low and it was using gdm to log in, so I installed
Arch again and used gdm and now its fine.
Cheers
Paul-S
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