Re: Xorg 100% cpu with gnome

[walt <w41ter%gmail.com@localhost>]

Greg Troxel wrote:
> I'm not sure what's wrong, so I'll describe it and would appreciate
> reports of similar trouble.
>
> I have a Thinkpad T60 that I've been running NetBSD on since 2006-08.  I
> recently upgraded from 4.99.{summer 08} to 5.0_RC2 (March 3 build).  I
> generally track pkgsrc head, and updated around 3/22-3/24 (via pkg_rr).
> At some point recently I noticed the fan being loud, but thought it was
> the disk.  Last night I realized that Xorg was pegged at 100% of 1 cpu,
> but everything still works.  geeqie (gqview ng) was very slow, which is
> why I noticed.
>
> I removed applets from my panel one at a time, and chmod'd things like
> nautilus and metacity to 0 and killed them, until I was left with
> gnome-session and xterm, and still Xorg was pegged.  xlsclients needs a
> way to show # requests recently or cpu time due to each client - is
> there some easy way to check this?  Nothing obvious in Xorg.0.log.
>
> I am now using the same Xorg config, but with twm, xterm, emacs, xload,
> xclock, essentially the setup I used since switching from uwm around
> 1990 until I started using gnome, plus firefox 3, so I'm enjoying a bit
> of software retrocomputing.  Xorg shows 7m31 cpu time in 1h56 minutes.
> Seems like a lot, but not broken - around 7% average.
>
> So, I suspect something is wrong in gnome-session or the server.  I'll
> update pkgsrc and will pkg_rr again, and update along netbsd-5 and
> rebuild, but I want to suggest to others to check their servers, and I'd
> appreciate hearing any adverse reports.

Yes indeed, I was seeing 100% cpu (but only 1 of 2 cpu's) after updating
my gnome about a week ago.  I can't even begin to remember everything I
tweaked and recompiled or how many times I deleted my .gconf and .gnome2
and .nautilus directories etc. etc.

Eventually I got to the point that gnome is using trivial cpu cycles but
I can't tell you why :-(

However -- if I start gnome the same way I've been starting it for years
now, the first character I type on the keyboard completely locks up the
gnome desktop.  (Using 100% cpu was actually better ;-)

From my experience with gentoo linux, which is also suffering some gnome
keyboard weirdness lately, my gut feeling is that all of this has to do
with libxklavier or xf86-input-evdev (not sure pkgsrc is using that yet)
or at least *something* to do with the keyboard.

I do know from talking to the dbus devs that every X session should now
invoke the session manager with "dbus-launch your-session-manager-here"
for kde, gnome, and almost everything else as well.  You should also
start a system dbus-daemon at system startup, also hald and probably
consolekit as well.

The folks at opendesktop.org are pushing these changes to unify all of
the confusing and competing gui desktops -- but I'm a long way from
understanding the whole thing.