What is it that loads the CPU so unreasonably? (Lenovo W530 with Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, currently using kernel 5.4.0-110-generic x86_64).
After an upgrade, the CPU on my Lenovo W530 laptop spins at an increased (but not yet maximum) speed. The load indicator shows 267 processes, the quad-core CPU is over 27% utilized and 1.7 GiB of 6.7 GiB RAM (according to Taskmanager). All programs react quite delayed.
In the task manager I see that /usr/sbin/lightdm (with only little CPU load) calls /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch and that causes 25% CPU load (i.e. one complete thread of my Intel i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz CPU) and say 101.5 MiB RSS.
Meanwhile I have found out that the memory consumption sometimes continually accumulates. After quite some run time, even some swap space is used and even large amounts of memory stay in use, even after all application programs have been closed.
In order to find out what eats up all my memory I tried top with this command, which lets me direct its output to a file q:
top -c -n 1 -d 1 -w 256 > q
I have to set the width of the terminal wide enough to not truncate the command lines invoking the CPU stressing task, -w 512 seems to not work when the terminal width is small:
In a lucky situation when the whole computer does not acts sluggish and I get:
adalbert@W:~$ top -c -n 1 -d 1 -w 256 > q
adalbert@W:~$ cat q
top - 23:20:20 up 2:22, 1 user, load average: 1,14, 1,24, 1,23
Tasks: 258 gesamt, 2 laufend, 256 schlafend, 0 gestoppt, 0 Zombie
%CPU(s): 26,9 be, 11,9 sy, 0,0 ni, 61,2 un, 0,0 wa, 0,0 hi, 0,0 si, 0,0 st
MiB Spch : 6656,3 gesamt, 2318,3 frei, 2264,9 belegt, 2073,0 Puff/Cache
MiB Swap: 2048,0 gesamt, 2048,0 frei, 0,0 belegt. 4072,7 verfü Spch
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM ZEIT+ BEFEHL
1215 root 20 0 506648 165776 73068 R 100,0 2,4 135:17.46 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0 -+
2435 adalbert 20 0 422820 71496 39232 S 12,5 1,0 0:51.80 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/tou+
2003 adalbert 20 0 294092 87384 17492 S 6,2 1,3 11:48.71 xfsettingsd --display :0.0 --+
7727 adalbert 20 0 428024 77616 31952 S 6,2 1,1 0:31.07 /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal
34284 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 6,2 0,0 0:00.04 [kworker/3:1-events]
1 root 20 0 167876 11804 8388 S 0,0 0,2 0:01.28 /sbin/init splash
lightdm is the display manager. Why does it call Xorg -core …? in this special way?
Why does it use that much CPU power?
How can I cope with this situation?
0 Answers