CPU Load High (& Other Serious Issues)

[FuRrY321]

Hi everyone, been quite a while since I was last on here since I was using Vista (yeah, I know) for the longest time. But now I'm back.

Anyway, I recently reinstalled Sabayon 8 GNOME and all is well, even my Belkin wireless N adapter works fine so no need to tinker around with ndiswrapper like I had to in Fedora or Chakra.

But one major issue I've noticed is the CPU is under constant strain, even though only about half my 1GB RAM is being used (I usually have a 2GB set but it's being sent back from Corsair because it was defective).

This is most noticable when I'm playing music in Exaile and trying to do anything else, like browse the Internet through Firefox or Chromium. When the playback is paused or stopped, for the most part everything runs fine. I've noticed however that regardless of whether music is playing or not, load jumps about 20-30% just from switching between windows.

My specs are:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
1GB Companion or something generic RAM made in the US
ATi HD Radeon 3650 AGP 512MB
Cooler Master 500W PSU
Lame Biostar mobo

Lil' help?

[dudumomo]

Can you give us the result of the command "top" before playing a song and during??

It might be due to I/O access as well if Exaile is indexing your music?

Let's understand the reason !

[FuRrY321]

Before:

Code: Select all

alucai@sabayon ~ $ top

top - 09:39:54 up 4 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.46, 0.57, 0.28
Tasks: 138 total,   1 running, 137 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  4.1%us,  2.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 93.2%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1027364k total,   915184k used,   112180k free,    52392k buffers
Swap:  2047996k total,        0k used,  2047996k free,   355376k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 6824 root      20   0  202m  83m  49m S  4.3  8.3   0:16.34 X                 
 7957 alucai    20   0  158m  16m  11m S  2.0  1.6   0:00.99 gnome-terminal     
 7746 alucai    20   0  500m  81m  30m S  1.0  8.1   0:13.49 gnome-shell       
 7926 root      20   0 64932  39m 5704 S  0.3  3.9   0:08.00 entropy-updates   
    1 root      20   0  1948  572  500 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.48 init               
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd           
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.14 ksoftirqd/0       
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.44 kworker/0:0       
    5 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 kworker/u:0       
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0       
    7 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuset             
    8 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper           
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs         
   10 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns             
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u:1       
  505 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sync_supers       
  507 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bdi-default       


During:

Code: Select all

alucai@sabayon ~ $ top

top - 09:39:54 up 4 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.46, 0.57, 0.28
Tasks: 138 total,   1 running, 137 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  4.1%us,  2.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 93.2%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1027364k total,   915184k used,   112180k free,    52392k buffers
Swap:  2047996k total,        0k used,  2047996k free,   355376k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 6824 root      20   0  202m  83m  49m S  4.3  8.3   0:16.34 X                 
 7957 alucai    20   0  158m  16m  11m S  2.0  1.6   0:00.99 gnome-terminal     
 7746 alucai    20   0  500m  81m  30m S  1.0  8.1   0:13.49 gnome-shell       
 7926 root      20   0 64932  39m 5704 S  0.3  3.9   0:08.00 entropy-updates   
    1 root      20   0  1948  572  500 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.48 init               
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd           
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.14 ksoftirqd/0       
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.44 kworker/0:0       
    5 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 kworker/u:0       
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0       
    7 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuset             
    8 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper           
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs         
   10 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns             
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u:1       
  505 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sync_supers       
  507 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bdi-default       


There's not much difference to my untrained eye, but the numbers change all the time, including while I'm typing this. Launching System Monitor shows the CPU load to be anywhere from 60-100% while music is playing, averaging around 70% when I'm not doing anything else like scrolling in any application (which tends to make listening to music extremely difficult).

EDIT: Okay, there is something seriously wrong with my configuration. I noticed this when playing Audiosurf in WINE (which runs fine), but I thought nothing of it, since it's... well... WINE, but then I noticed it in Xonotic too. When using any other application besides Exaile, sound will be perfectly fine for the first minute or so; then it will cut out completely and not come back.

I don't know what's wrong with my system, but in addition to the problems I've been having, sometimes the WM, or perhaps GNOME-Shell in general, I'm not sure, will disappear, leaving a very hard-to-use desktop, until it comes back after a few seconds.

I may have to try out Ubuntu again. While it requires more work than Sabayon to get my wireless and sometimes sound working just the way I want it to, I may have less of these strange issues.

EDIT: Okay, I have gone back to Ubuntu for now. I'll give it a shot, but so far so good. If, however, I continue to have more issues such as these, I'll chalk it up to having only 1GB of RAM and wait until I get my 2GB back from Corsair, no matter how silly that may seem when talking about a Linux OS.

[dudumomo]

I do have this similar issue on my sabayon laptop with Gnome3. Sometimes the windows will disappear leaving the environment like fresh when couple of second after will go back as originally.

Need to dig further the reason.

FuRrY321, Sabayon is not as well supported as Ubuntu (Far less users) so all the added information and tests if possible are more than welcome. (It's like giving back to the community).
Saying that, I need to do it as well xD