High CPU usage

[mastablasta]

To see if my GPU would be supported well enough i did a full test install to USB drive.

so the disk is a 16GB Toshiba drive, USB2.0, but among the faster ones

PC is:
AMD Athlon 64 single core, [WRONG! 3.2 Ghz WRONG!] EDIT: it's 3800+ 2,4 Ghz
4 GB DDR2 RAM

GPU: nVidia GT 730 2GB

OS: Kubuntu 16.04.1 LTS 32 bit (i actually wanted to test 64bit, but i forgot it was 32 bit that was on the DVD drive). i went with the .1 since the kernel in it stays the same for longer time.

Test: install to USB drive, update & install nVidia driver.

Live CD worked well and loaded relatively fast from the DVD drive. I installed it to about 14 GB disk space and gave it 2 GB of /swap (it was left practically untouched during the whole test...). The install finished in abotu 45 minutes which is to be expected with this older PC and USB drive that is much slower than SATA.

Then i did the updates through Konsole and it downloaded about 455 Mb of updates. it took it 4 hours to install that. the nvidia driver install took about 1 hour.

all this time system monitor showed CPU at 100% and everything lagged a lot. but top didn't show any major increase. also the system monitor itself accounted only about 30% of CPU use.

this was also the case after installing everything. the menus and such seem responsive, but once an app is loaded (e.g. Firefox, Kate) everything is slowed down a lot. i can't find what is causing the slow down. OK for the app to load slow the USB is at fault, but after that there is plenty of RAM being available... how could i find the process responsible for taking so much CPU?

here are the readings when CPU was used 100%



Top showed similar usage.

The CPU is used 6-10% or less (2-3 %) when on idle. probably something that is expected.

Another issue was that after installing nvidia drivers all fonts were huge, while the LCD monitor was recognised as CRT. i guess others have faced that and this is solvable.

[Snowhog]

AMD Athlon 64 single core, 3.2 Ghz

Hardware requirements call for a minimum of a dual-core CPU. I’m not surprised that your CPU is being overworked.

[mastablasta]

why a dual core? anyway i need to do another test, but i think it all runs fluently in live session. and as far as i remeber (before in 2016) when i tried it all with the even older AMD card it all ran even faster.

i am more interested into what is occupying the CPU because it is not showing on any monitors.

the machine can run many games up to arround 2009. i realise that games need GPU more than CPU, but still, it should be able to handle the desktop. The special effects should be donw on GPU (anyway) and probably they are. it handles it mostly, but just every once in a while it has a big spike that just goes on and on. and i can't seem to find the reason. the updates maybe should take that long with only console open and nothing else.

like when you press the K menu it opens instantly and i can browse it. it is slower from USB (probably it has to read data from it), while in Live session it is all working super fast.

when i run the application it takes up the CPU but the CPU is still high even when application is loaded. and it is not showing the application clogging it.

i will do another test in live session and i will also get the 64bit version.

and just in case i will also try it all with Xubuntu, eventhough i am not sure these desktops present much of a major differenece in terms of resource usage. ok LXDE and XFCE normally have less, but that is mostly just because effects are not there. and they are mostly drawn on GPU anyway.right?

[jlittle]

Some kinds of system CPU activity do not show against processes in such displays. I wish I knew how to diagnose this situation.

IME on similar hardware:[list][*]One box had a memory issue, due to a lack of it, but I think you have enough. [*]Another ran really well, if slow to boot, on Lubuntu, until 16.04, when it slowed like yours, with no process the culprit. Older nVidia chip than yours.[/list ]
so I don't know what your system is doing. You might try 14.04, it still has over a year of support.

Regards, John Little

[Snowhog]

why a dual core?

Just letting you know what the developers say about minimum hardware requirements.

It is possible that what’s going on is the initial file indexing, which is rather CPU intensive, and until it finishes, it can slow other processes down.

[GreyGeek]

Yesterday I installed KDE Neon User Edition on a 2008 Dell Vostro 1500, which has 2GB of RAM, Intel Core 2, a 120GB of HD, and an old NVIDIA 6800GS card. To get the BCM4311 wifi working I had to install b43 but after that everything ran smoothly. The display was fast and gorgeous. After the install was complete I did an update and 400+ apps came down my fiber optic. It took about 3 minutes to DL and about 45 minutes to install. Since I used Btrfs after the update was complete I created a @ and @home backup.

I can open FF and a Konsole but after that things start slowing down. IF FF is playing a YT video and nothing else is open the video plays fine. But, the fellow wanted to replace the XP with "what I was running" and all he wants to do on it is browse, and the occasional email. Having only two threads limits the "multi-tasking" that box can do. Perhaps another 2-4GB of RAM might help, but for what he wants to do what it can do now is all he wants.

[mastablasta]

It is possible that what’s going on is the initial file indexing, which is rather CPU intensive, and until it finishes, it can slow other processes down.

that's what i was thinking about yesterday as well. i remember it was an issue in the older machine, so i left it overnight to do it's job. but the old search indexing showed up in the system resources usage.
if you look at my screen you can see 100% CPU taken, but when you see the upper parts where processes are sorted by CPU usage it should be more like 30 or 40 % used. similar picture is showing in top. i will try with htop or gkrelm to see if they show any difference.

EDIT: if it is doing the indexing - does ti index only the files in the system drive or will it do the other two drives (NTFS) as well? they are not set to be auto mounted.

i will also do another test with live session to compare the responsiveness. the issue with live session is that nvidia drivers are only opensource, but it looks like drivers are not the issue.
if i have time i will also try xubuntu and the 17.10 version.

Yesterday I installed KDE Neon User Edition on a 2008 Dell Vostro 1500, which has 2GB of RAM, Intel Core 2, a 120GB of HD, and an old NVIDIA 6800GS card. To get the BCM4311 wifi working I had to install b43 but after that everything ran smoothly. The display was fast and gorgeous. After the install was complete I did an update and 400+ apps came down my fiber optic. It took about 3 minutes to DL and about 45 minutes to install. Since I used Btrfs after the update was complete I created a @ and @home backup.

I can open FF and a Konsole but after that things start slowing down. IF FF is playing a YT video and nothing else is open the video plays fine. But, the fellow wanted to replace the XP with "what I was running" and all he wants to do on it is browse, and the occasional email. Having only two threads limits the "multi-tasking" that box can do. Perhaps another 2-4GB of RAM might help, but for what he wants to do what it can do now is all he wants.

does that nvidia card have GPU drivers? because if not, then the task of drawing desktop could be on CPU.
I have 14.04 installed with celeron E3300 dual core and an old radeon 256 MB card with 2 Gb ram. it can multitask just fine (default desktop effects are on). the only issue are games as they would mostly just crash or freeze. but that is a driver issue.

i also have AMD E-450 with 2 GB ram (this CPU should have about the same power as my single core, except it is a dual core CPU with low energy consumption - AMD answer to Intel Atom). it currently has 14.04 64 bit installed with 2 GB ram (i planned to upgrade RAM later on). it is a dual boot and linux works so much faster on it that win7 starter that is on the other side. i think on that one i disabled the indexing. it has fglrx drivers. compared to WIn 7 starter (which has only one desktop and nearly no desktop effects) Kubuntu has it all. but that is the KDE4 version. and even though kde5 uses more resources it doesn't make sense that it wouldn't use dramatically more. live session 16.04 performs well on this machine, but i held off with the upgrade, due to radeon drivers (no more fglrx for this chip). although they might be ready by now.

edit2: after some more digging i might not be the only one affected. it seems the cause depends from setup to setup:
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?...21533&start=60
and a few possible fixes : https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?...36964&start=15

i am thinking that i could probably go with Kubuntu, but then when issues arise switch to another DE. i could just add the XFCE and then move to that in case i get too many issues.

[Rod J]

I would advise sticking with Kubuntu Plasma 5.

I installed Xubuntu 14.04 on my old Kodi PC (HP SFF Pentium 4HT with 2Gb mem) and although it runs OK I have gradually come to the conclusion that I don't like Xfce! I find it odd to maintain and rather old fashioned (at least in 14.04). It sets some things up so weirdly I just can't fathom the reasoning behind it.

On my ancient laptop (2009? old 32bit Pentium Dual Core, 2Gb mem) I installed Mint Xfce 18 "Sarah" and that runs a little better but I booted that with a live USB Mint KDE 18.2 Plasma 5 (just to see how it would run that) and surprisingly it ran no slower than Xfce and memory usage was similar (if not better).

I would definitely turn off indexing (I've never needed or used it myself) and in any case make sure it isn't trying to index other partitions.

[mastablasta]

well it is promising then. i just remembered this PC has Xubuntu in Virtualbox. i use it for various testing and browsing of any suspicious pages.

XFCE is a bit basic but like KDE it is very easy to modify it to your preferences. for example my test virtualbox setup, i removed all the unnecessary addons, some basic windows. and it runs almost like it's native OS.i gave it 1Gb ram and it can easilly run about 3 applications at the same time (e.g browser, terminal and some text editor). and this is all in a virtual machine. that is why i think KDE5 should work on this PC: and if not, i can always go to XFCE. even if new one is maybe a bit strange i can always make it old :-)

[mastablasta]

so i managed to install htop, but same thing. nothing is shown to be taking up too much CPU.

one thing that bothered me is that when i was trying to install htop, it kept saying the folder is locked. so i payed close attention to top at the time and saw that unnatended- upgrades is popping up and down the table. it looks like they locked the drive. i waited for them to finish whatever they were doing, to be able to install htop, i then set the compositor to use OpenGL 3, turned off baloo, but there was no change.

so i did a reboot and after that system usage was fine, everything was very responsive (well loading of apps took a bit longer, because it is from USB), but once they loaded all was responsive. also the CPU usage was very low (within what could be expected)

i then also noticed that despite running the upgrades the system still had plenty of upgrades to do. all in all it seems the slowness of the OS and high CPU usage was from unfinished updates. maybe the compositor switch to OpenGL3 also helped (eventhough it hsouldn't matter since live session works well). i was also unaware that unnatended-upgrades were enabled by default. as i know in 14.04 you had to manually enable them.

Htop along with Ksysguard. Htop showing usage of 11%CPU, while guard's usage is showing it near the top. It also acts as if full CPU was used. Though again if one looks at the processes there is nothing there that would have such high CPU usage.



well that's all i could do in about an hour or two on the machine, then kids wanted me to boot back to windows :-)