I'm running Mint 13 KDE. I just upgraded last night. I noticed that occasionally, the process "plasma-desktop" starts eating up enormous amounts of CPU, eventually causing my machine to overheat and lock. It started again about a half hour ago, so I tried to nice it (19), but it kept going, well above 200 degrees F. Finally, in an effort to save my hardware, I just killed the plasma-desktop process and restarted it. It's fine for now. Any ideas why plasma would be doing this?

Note: In general, my machine seems to be running a lot hotter under Mint 13 than the previous version (which used an older KDE). Even with no significant CPU, my machine is often above 180 degrees F. Any ideas on that one?

For overall temperature - it may be worth monitoring CPU usage using a program such as KSysguard or htop to see if any program in particular is misbehaving. Note that it could also be changes in the underlying stack (especially the kernel) which have caused the thermal management regressions.

For Plasma specifically, this should not occur normally. Do you have any 3rd party applets in use on your desktop? Also, is there any particular action or time interval which triggers this issue?

bcooksley wrote:For overall temperature - it may be worth monitoring CPU usage using a program such as KSysguard or htop to see if any program in particular is misbehaving. Note that it could also be changes in the underlying stack (especially the kernel) which have caused the thermal management regressions.

For Plasma specifically, this should not occur normally. Do you have any 3rd party applets in use on your desktop? Also, is there any particular action or time interval which triggers this issue?

Thanks for the reply. I used top (less resource intensive than htop, I think) and I also used the ctrl-esc monitor from krunner ("system activity"). Nothing seems to be using any notable cpu consistently except korg, and then not very much.

When plasma-desktop took off, of course it was using fairly large amounts of cpu (70+%). I have two applets which are built-ins (binary clock and a terminal applet). I also run gkrellm, but that kept running when I killed plasma because I guess it's not dependent on it.

I didn't notice any particular time interval. I set up gkrellm to give me a verbal warning in case the temp exceeds a certain amount so that I could keep it running all night and it would wake me if it got too hot. Nothing happened.

The cpu temp is still a little high though. Perhaps plasma or some other kde component is a little more intensive in this version than the previous versions?

Sorry. That should be "xorg" and not "korg." I thnk "korg" is a synthesizer company

To my knowledge Plasma has not changed significantly, although KWin could have in it's use of your graphics card. This could especially be the case if you are using the OSS drivers for a ATI/Nvidia card. korg could also be KOrganiser

Would it be possible for you to temporarily reset your Plasma configuration back to default for a day or two to see if you can still reproduce this issue?

(Just move the plasma* files at ~/.kde4/share/config/ elsewhere while Plasma Desktop is not running).

I'll give that a shot. Thanks!