Re: X server consuming lots of CPU cycles

[Philip Prindeville <philipp_subx redfish-solutions com>]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

>In the past few days I've noticed that the X server process is
>consuming 20-80% of the CPU on a regular basis as opposed to a more
>reasonable once in a blue moon.  I haven't updated in about a week and
>was reluctant to do so until I saw a fix for the libXfont/xfs issues.
>I don't suppose anyone else is seeing unusually high X server usage
>recently or is aware of some change that would explain what I'm
>seeing.  FWIW, I am running a A31p Thinkpad with 1G RAM and a 2+Ghz
>processor.  The logs do not seem to show anything out of the ordinary.
>
>-pmr
>  
>

I saw this a while ago and remembered a posting on the xorg mailing
list about a change in the X server's scheduler would cause this sort
of behavior in certain pathological cases on Linux (it was a while ago
or I'd hunt for the citation).

If you're running GDM, then you can do:

cat >> /etc/gdm/custom.conf

[server-Standard]
priority=-10

^D
% gdm-restart


and see if that works.

-Philip