[SOLVED?] At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

[Snowhog]

Rekonq and Kontact running but idle (I'm not doing anything in either), and Conky loaded.

I'm noticing that my CPU is being driven more since the upgrade from KDE 4.6.4 to 4.6.5 a few days ago. Now it isn't driving my CPU excessively, but all four cores on my HP Pavilion g7-1070us are being used constantly more than before the upgrade. TOP shows that kwin is using, on average, around 3.33 percent of the CPU, while Xorg is averaging slightly higher than that. That isn't a lot, and certainly not excessive. But both observed conditions are higher than what was observed in 4.6.4.

Additionally, each core is reporting constant use, averaging over fifteen percent on each when idle.

Is anyone else noticing higher CPU usage since the upgrade to 4.6.5?

[wizard10000]

Re: At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

32-bit netbook seems about normal but I do see some weirdness in system monitor when i click on the system load tab - which shows 85-90% processor use while the graphs don't bear that out and neither does top.

[Snowhog]

Re: At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

Interestingly though, the reported temps on Core 0 and Core 1 have not themselves increased - both average below 100 degrees F. This would seem to be contrary to the reported constant increase of use of all four cores. But the other thing I'm seeing is the reported speed of the CPU. The CPU is rated at 2.5GHz, and in KDE 4.6.4, I rarely saw it reported that high, mostly showing 933Mhz. Now I'm seeing reported speeds running the gamut, from 933MHz to 2533MHz and numbers inbetween. Load balancing I believe, and I wonder if that is why, although the cores are used constantly at higher percentages, the temps are staying low.

[wizard10000]

Re: At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

Probably, since powerdevil doesn't manage CPU throttling any more - the kernel does.

[Snowhog]

Re: At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

Discovered this evening what was wrong. I had conky set to run at startup (System Settings > Startup and Shutdown), but apparently was pointing to /etc/conky/conky.conf instead of /usr/bin/conky and this was causing an additional instance of conky to be started each time I rebooted (the previous conky, plus a new instance). I discovered this when, this evening upon booting, conky wasn't updating itself every 2 seconds as I had it configured. It was updating about every 10 seconds. So, I opened a console and ran top and saw multiple conky processes. I ran sudo killall conky and watched as over a dozen conky sessions were killed!

Restared conky (alt+F2 conky) and CPU Cores are again showing 0% when I'm doing nothing.

[Snowhog]

Re: [SOLVED?] At rest, KDE 4.6.5 CPU usage constantly 'higher' than in 4.6.4?

Well-l-l-l, maybe not solved (after all). I'm seeing multiple instances of conky, even when /usr/bin/conky is the program that I add to Startup. I've removed that entry and will resort to just launching (Alt+F2) conky after the desktop presents.

Well, now (again?) I think I've found out why this is happening. In System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Session Management I had Restore previous session checked. That would account for why conky was accumulating instances, given that I also had it in Startup. I've changed the (latter) setting to Start with an empty session and added /usr/bin/conky as a program back into Startup. I'll monitor this and see how it goes.