I have just installed kubuntu 9.10 and I am having problems with xorg using high cpu when anthing happens on the screen. My tests are simply having top running and then dragging another window around the desktop or resizing it. I also see similar high loads from scrolling a webpage with flash playing, swapping to different app windows, opening features in digikam. Anything that involves changing the displayed windows causes xorg to use loads of cpu.

Using my standard 'test', konsole open running top and dolpin open and with desktop effects on. After settling, if I don't do anything, xorg will be using 0.5-2% cpu. If I drag the dolphin window around in circles xorg wil rise to 30-40% cpu load. Grabbing a corner and resizing the dolphin window back and forth will cause load to rise to 80-90% and will be very jerky. If I turn desktop effect off it actually gets worse. Dragging the window around will then use 50-60% load and resizing will still be 80-90.

My graphics card is an ATI 9800 pro (128M). I know it is a bit old now but it should be able to cope with redrawing windows. ATI have dropped support for the card so I have to use open drivers. I have gone through the help page that is on the kde site but non of the suggestions helped and it was mostly aimed at nvidia cards anyway. I have also tried altering the options in the advanced tab of desktop settings but there was no improvement.

I am looking into whether I can tweak xorg.conf to improve the driver performance and may post a bug against the driver but I would like to get a better idea of what may be causing it. Does anyone know what features of the driver/graphics card are being used by moving a windows about? I am thinking that if I could find this out it may make it easier to troubleshoot the driver.

thanks

i have the same problem. seems to be a problem with "konsole" when resizing it (xorg uses 70 - 100 % cpu). happens also on yakuake and dolphin (both use "konsole"). i do not have problems when moving the windows (even with full transparency enabled). also tested without effects - no improvement.

im using openbox(same problem in kde) on ubuntu 9.10. nvidia quadro fx 550
no problems before upgrading from 9.04

reszing windows has always been dead slow on kde4, part of this is I guess a qt bug or missing feature. Recently qt made a patch for this and I asked for it to be included in kde's qt-copy but the answer was negative, see last 4-5 comments on this report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183263

aapgorilla wrote:reszing windows has always been dead slow on kde4, part of this is I guess a qt bug or missing feature. Recently qt made a patch for this and I asked for it to be included in kde's qt-copy but the answer was negative, see last 4-5 comments on this report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183263

thx for that hint.

updating to qt 4.6 seems to have improved the situation. but still sometimes i have bad response time when i try to open yakuake.

@bailout
used this to update qt:
https://launchpad.net/~mapopa/+archive/qt4.6

edmund, thanks for the link. tbh I have run into a couple of problems with other apps which combined with a lack of time and inclination to chase problems at the moment means I am thinking of just restoring my 9.04 ubuntu install.

I will probably image my 9.10 kubuntu before doing so so I will try updating 4.6 and see if it helps. Is it just that one file that needs updating? I assumed that the apps needed to be updated against a new qt version? (I am not a programmer so don't understand how it really works)

Well i have ati radeon 9600 pro 256vram and window resizing is smooth (even with desktop effects enabled). I no longer see problems when qt 4.5 came out. Everything is fast. But there might be problems with xserver 1.6.3 which is in karmic, while jaunty used 1.6.0. Its a small change, but since 1.6.1 everything became a bit more laggy to me so im still using 1.6.0, and as i said, everything is fast and smooth with 1.6.0. So the hardware isnt the problem. You could try to add "AccelDFS True" to your xorg.conf, but im not sure if this will help.

I have no problem with resizing, etc., but I do have high cpu usage by X. As long as I have a laptop with a 4+-year-old ATi graphics chip I guess nothing can be done about that. It's working as well as can be expected, but the cost is in resources.