Arch Linux

WyoPBS

Member

From: Cheyenne, WY

Registered: 2007-10-05

Posts: 101

Website

How can CPU usage exceed 100%?

Some time in the recent past a problem has come up with my performance.  But that's a personal issue; instead I'll discuss my computer's performance. {rimshot}

Used to be, my 8-gig dual-core 64-bit 3.0Ghz AMD with nVidia Geforce 9500 could run three instances of Second Life without any performance problems; CPU usage would never go above 20% or so.

Lately my streaming music fans (that is, fans of streaming music, not music fans who are themselves streaming...)  have noticed a serious degradation of sound quality. I use idjc as my streamer, and now when I am in SL there are noticeable skips during song play -- just a fraction of a second, but frequently enough that it makes the music scratchy.  I fired up top the other day and it showed Second Life (using a variant of the Snowglobe viewer) maxing out CPU usage at 100% or even higher, just occasionally dipping to 40 or 50% before going through the roof again.  Turning the graphics detail options down did not have any noticeable effect.

As far as I know there have not been any major changes to the SL viewer in the past few months, just a few incremental changes to features.  I am on the current (as of 12/13/10) updates to all Arch files.

What's even stranger is, gnome system monitor doesn't show that.  It shows X itself at maybe 2-6% and it doesn't list the child processes (such as SL) at all. The CPU history graph shows CPU1 and CPU2 both hovering constantly between 50% and 65%.  So now I wonder if top is broken, and misreporting CPU usage.  But there's still the audio problem that only comes up while SL is active.

Any suggestions on diagnostics I can run, or ways I can make SL less CPU-hungry?

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Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY