For a while I've been using gkrellm instead of kde's plasmids, mainly because I just like it more than plasmids and its easier on CPU usage. I like some of kwin's special effects, not so much for the eye candy but the functionality purposes. With kwin turned off, the xorg and kwin processes use 0-1% CPU, but with them on, they can go from 2%-8% constantly while not doing anything at all. If I shut down gkrellm with kwin special effects turned on, the CPU usage drops back down from 0-1%.

How does gkrellm affect kwin and xorg so much, and what can I do about this?

I think you mean plasmoids, I doubt some circular DNA (plasmid) is going to have any impact on your destkop.

More seriously, what graphics driver are you using? What is your CPU and distribution? (and of course, the version of the KDE libraries)

I use GKrellm and KDE4 too, I like how gkrellm can be configured to cram lot of system info into such a small space at the side of the screen. Anyway, I haven't really noticed that gkrellm and kwin interact like that, out of curiosity which graphics card/drivers are you using? One thing I can think of is going into gkrellm config and turning down "Krell and LED updates per second", I have mine at 1 or 2, I think the default is 10 or more which might be the reason you see CPU usage increase of kwin because it's being updated so frequently with compositing on.

lol oh ya i forgot it was plasmoids - just goes to show how often i use them.

i'm using an overclocked amd opteron 180 at 2.7ghz, and i have an nvidia 8400gs. overclocking and underclocking both the cpu and gpu makes no difference - as specified before, xorg and kwin ONLY consume a lot of cpu usage if kwin's compositing effects are turned off, OR if gkrellm is shut down. but, gkrellm itself is only using 1% cpu usage, sometimes 0%.

schmidtbag wrote:as specified before, xorg and kwin ONLY consume a lot of cpu usage if kwin's compositing effects are turned off, OR if gkrellm is shut down.

You mean the opposite, don't you? Otherwise I'm confused.

schmidtbag wrote:With kwin turned off, the xorg and kwin processes use 0-1% CPU, but with them on, they can go from 2%-8% constantly while not doing anything at all. If I shut down gkrellm with kwin special effects turned on, the CPU usage drops back down from 0-1%.

yup, sorry about that

what release of kde4 are you running? I experienced high kwin cpu utilization in one of the earlier releases (4.4 or 4.5) that didn't appear in earlier ones and upping to the latest release resolved it for me. Never tried turning off gKrellm so had no idea it could interact so with kwin.

google01103 wrote:what release of kde4 are you running? I experienced high kwin cpu utilization in one of the earlier releases (4.4 or 4.5) that didn't appear in earlier ones and upping to the latest release resolved it for me. Never tried turning off gKrellm so had no idea it could interact so with kwin.

i'm running 4.4.5-1. i could have sworn i was running 4.5 but i guess not...

i'm running debian, do you know which repo has 4.5? i'm currently using both sid and squeeze.

see http://qt-kde.debian.net/ this is 4.5.1, don't use the big D, so no idea if 4.5.2 is available (found this by Google'ing). You could post a new thread here, or on Debian asking about 4.5.2

google01103 wrote:see http://qt-kde.debian.net/ this is 4.5.1, don't use the big D, so no idea if 4.5.2 is available (found this by Google'ing). You could post a new thread here, or on Debian asking about 4.5.2

well, I'll see if updating works. I'll report back if it doesn't.

hmm.... i don't think this is what i'm looking for. first of all, kwin (or most kde packages) aren't even an option for upgrading, but also checking off any of the packages from that repo is threatening to remove half my programs, which i'd really prefer not to do.

i added the debiane experimental repo, but that offered nothing. the one thing i really hate about debian is its SOOO out of date, even when you tell it to use unstable packages.

maybe time to try a Debian derivative? you could dl a livecd Kubuntu or Mint or and see if that will resolve the problem before before installing.

last time i did that it caused a LOT of problems, where it wouldn't even boot up anymore. this isn't really that huge of a deal, i suppose i could wait. i had to wait a good month for kde 4.4 to release. i just don't understand why the debian dev team doesn't push this - i remember when kde 4.5 was just released, it said explicitly that it was just a bunch of bugfixes so there is no reason why not to update. if anything, debian using 4.4 is being LESS stable than if it were to just update something that hasn't been "thoroughly tested"

fyi - list of distro's based on Debian with KDE http://distrowatch.com/search.php?categ ... tus=Active

you could try Compiz for effects, when I had the kwin cpu issues I used Compiz without any issues (thought the defaults were stupid - moving windows default was off and something else really needed was defaulted to off)