Cpu usage by X (with more info) -even more

Kwan Lowe kwan at digitalhermit.com
Tue May 4 21:38:40 UTC 2010


On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:19 PM, DB <Freddog_de at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

[snip]

> Tasks: 128 total,   3 running, 125 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 53.6%us, 45.4%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.7%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:    510416k total,   451276k used,    59140k free,    22560k buffers
> Swap:  2047992k total,     2140k used,  2045852k free,   199012k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  1922 root         20   0 72224  30m 5748 R 69.5  6.1  15:45.70 X
>  2132 Dave       20   0  126m  33m  21m R 24.5  6.7   1:20.48 ksysguard
>  2088 Dave       20   0  259m  28m  18m S  2.6  5.6   0:03.76 kwin
>  2091 Dave       20   0  297m  24m  14m S  0.7  4.9   0:02.54 knotify4
>  2092 Dave       20   0  304m  37m  23m S  0.7  7.4   0:13.00 plasma-desktop

A few things could be happening:

1) Your CPU may be in a throttled state already. top is not giving an
absolute percentage of cpu utilization versus the full capability of
the processor.  I.e., the CPU% may be misleading.

2) Running top itself outputs lots of data to the display. You may get
different results if you SSH'ed into the system and ran top remotely.

3) You're running a graphics intensive desktop (plasma). If you don't
have proper hardware support then the CPU will have to do all the
heavy lifting. Even something as innocuous as scrolling text on a
transparent window will chew up CPU cycles.


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