It has come to my attention that upon starting up that my system is now starting much slower (I do have two applications in startup but it has gotten worse since) Xorg and plasma-desktop have been using a lot of CPU, both usually at 30+% and occasionally 40%. I understand that this isn't xserver's fault but some application. I only have a P4 some this is kind of excessive. I can't seem to track down the application because it seems to all of a sudden level out, in fact as I started this new topic both xorg and plasma-desktop were using 30% and total cpu usage was at 100%. Now looking back on System Monitor Xorg and plasma-desktop aren't going over 10% and total usage is usually in the 20's.

It seems fixed but this happens occasionally where it will level out, but go right back to high cpu usage when I restart (not just during startup but usually 30 + minutes after or more) I'm not running any heavy apps just browser, im, irc, and kontact which are usually in the system tray and not active.

I've looked at GPU performance: http://userbase.kde.org/GPU-Performance and have tried a few of the tips but nothing seems to work (my resizing of windows is choppy as well as moving them, folderview and other plasmoids are perfect though)

Could anyone help me with bringing down my CPU usage, I'm considering a distro switch that has become so bad in the past week. I understand that this is a very broad request because many things could be wrong, but I just like to hear what other possibilities there are that are causing this.

More info:

Kubuntu 9.10
GPU: Nvidia 9400GT (PCI) - Very slow...

By the way anyone got any comments on the Chakra Project, which I'm considering switching to?

Which version of KDE are you using, and which Plasma applets do you have installed?

Oops forgot to mention that important part, KDE 4.3.1 (This didn't exactly happen after any upgrades, but something that has become more noticeable in terms of performance over time)

I have 3 comic plugins, 2 desktop notes, cwp, bball, the eyes things, calculator, parley, and dictionary.

Once again I just booted up and CPU usage is at 100%. Could it possibly be a plasmoid then that is going crazy at startup? But stops pestering xserver and plasma after a while.

Yes, it is very likely to be a Plasmoid constantly repainting itself causing this. If this occurs after the 10-20 seconds or so after Plasma has finished starting up then start removing Plasmoids and restarting Plasma ( kquitapp plasma-desktop && sleep 10s && plasma-desktop & ) until the problem stops.

Then please report a bug at bugs.kde.org aganist it.

Well I've just tried that, and removed all of my plasmoids on the dashboard, but cpu usage remained at 100%. I have kontact running in tray all the time could that possibly be causing it?

There may be Plasmoids in the panel that could be causing it also. It is unlikely to be Kontact causing it, as Plasma does not draw that.

Well it turns out it was System Tray. I removed it from the panel and immediately the cpu usage went down to almost nothing.

Now I just need to figure out what to say in the bug report against it. Got any suggestions? For info I could look up as to why it's using so much CPU?

I'm a little disappointed because I liked having kontact and kopete in there so those apps didn't take up on any space on the panel.

Thank you very much for all of your help

Unfortunately I do not know what exactly would cause the system tray to do that, please mention in your bug report which applications ( and their versions ) you had in your system tray as that is likely related.

Well thanks to a commenter I found out that having 'hidden categories' (Settings and unchecking one of the icons to show) was causing the cpu usage. Hopefully this bug will be resolved soon, for the mean time I can live with a few extra icons in my tray.

But thank you very much bcooksley.

did you do a bug report, anyway?

Yes but it turned out to be a duplicate: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207289

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204070