plasmashell high CPU load

[barlowrm]

Dear all,

I am having a problem with plasmashell: whenever the notification icon is animated (like when moving a large file), plasmashell's CPU usage goes to 100%, and the whole desktop becomes very slow.

I have googled a bit, and there are several bugs like this on the kde bug tracking, but all are marked as resolved.

Am I the only one seeing this?

It looks to me like a rather macroscopic defect for a public release, so I assume this must be happening only to a few users.
Any hints on how to solve the issue (like disabling the animations in the notification icon) are welcome.

Cheers,

Andrea.

[deadite66]

I've been seeing the same too, for me it starts out fine but after a while plasmashell and Xorg hit 40% cpu between them.

[ronw]

Not a solution, but I noticed "Track file transfers and other jobs" in Notification Settings (right click Notifications in the System Tray). Maybe turning that off will help as a workaround.

[barlowrm]

Hi ronw,

thanks for your reply. the thing is that if I turn that off, I don't have ANY progress indicator for file transfers anymore. Not even a notification saying "ok I'm done". The only way to know if a copy of a large file has finished is to periodically refresh the target folder in dolphin and compare original and copied sizes.

Which is not really a workable solution

Cheers,

Andrea.

[arindom]

I am also facing the same problem.

After using the system for a while, I am noticing that gradually the CPU temp is increasing and also the plasmashell process is also reaching 15% of CPU usage. My CPU temp is showing above 90 degrees celsius at times.

I am now using Kubuntu backports and on 5.3. Also to note that I am using nVidia X.org Nouveau drivers.

Is this because of display driver issue? Someone please help to at least find some workaround.

[xennex81]

I consider the "show progress only in the notification area" to be a weird solution in any case. Perhaps nicer (if very well done) but hard to get it right. I wish the target window for the file copy would just have a progress bar embedded in it.

[arindom]

I consider the "show progress only in the notification area" to be a weird solution in any case. Perhaps nicer (if very well done) but hard to get it right. I wish the target window for the file copy would just have a progress bar embedded in it.

Yes, that would have been good.

About the high CPU usage and high CPU temp, I further noticed that when there was no network, that means Wi-Fi is switched OFF, both the CPU usage and the temp comes down to a much lower value. CPU usage of Plasmashell shows about 6/7% and CPU temp hovers around 55-60 degress Celsius.

[arindom]

It looks like, now the issue of high CPU usage for "plasmashell" and high CPU temp is not happening anymore for my system.

I had the Network widget ON. I just turned it OFF and now both the issues seems to be resolved, at least in my case. Plasmashell is now using 0.8% of CPU at the normal level usage and also the CPU temp has reduced to 56 degrees Celsius.

[Guest]

arindom has it spot-on! That is definitely the issue. It was similar in Plasma 4 but not as bad as this. Kind of a showstopper in my book being such an "advancement" for KDE. I hope this is just growing pains of a new codebase, otherwise, it will really not just suck up resources and increase load but shorten the life of our machines. That kind of planned obsolescence is not a good plan when the beauty of Linux is the ability to stretch out the life of your machine. Save the planet, eh?