[xmonad] X consuming a lot of CPU

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com
Sat Jun 19 08:59:02 EDT 2010


Every now and then I find that Xorg suddenly uses a lot of CPU for a
while, making xmonad non-responsive.  In general, this seems to be a
fault of either Firefox or Emacs (in that xrestop says Firefox is using
the most responses but for me it usually becomes unresponsive whilst I'm
using Emacs).

As of today, xorg has been using at least 60% of my CPU most of the
time, making xmonad very non-responsive.  I was thinking that the issue
was with xmonad, especially when I subsequently booted into KDE and had
no problems.

However, that seems to not be the case: the problem was my terminal
emulator (I realised this when I noticed that the most CPU usage was
occurrring whilst looking at the top output in my terminal).  I'm
normally use Xfce's Terminal [1], and it seems that it seems to be the
cause of the problems: when I switched to xterm, my problems all
disappeared (and when I was in KDE, I was using Konsole, not Terminal).

[1]: http://www.xfce.org/projects/terminal

I would be interested in hearing if anyone else has similar problems and
uses another vte-based terminal emulator (such as Gnome's terminal);
more specifically, if using a different terminal emulator solves their
problem.

For comparison purposes, I have vte-0.24.1 and Terminal-0.4.5.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com


More information about the xmonad mailing list