[vox-tech] Xorg high CPU usage in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) - Dell Inspiron 1525 w/ Intel 965GM chip

[Bill Broadley]

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> After upgrading to the latest Ubuntu (9.04 aka Jaunty), my system has
> been VERY sluggish.  Videos didn't play back properly.  Xorg was chewing
> up a minimum of 30% CPU almost all the time, even if nothing was going on...
> even if I disabled the compositing effects in KDE4's Kwin window manager.

There's been quite a big of reorganization for the intel driver, tons of
restructuring, kernel tweaks, and indeed some serious regressions.  I'm hoping
that nvidia's north bridge replacement will embarass intel into raising the
performance bar for embedded graphics.  The macbook has already been fixed,
next is the netbooks/nettops.

> This seemed to help :)
> 
>   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

Cool.

> I'm still a bit annoyed at how sluggish this one year old laptop is
> getting to be, and am starting to wonder if I should just switch to
> command-line all the time, or maybe Xfce.

I found XFCE particularly efficient on both cpu and ram, combined with the
xfce terminal I was pretty impressed.  You could actually click on net
terminal 3 times quickly that the terminals would appear as fast as you clicked.

In any case with the amazingly slow intel graphics I'd definitely turn off as
much of the dynamic eye candy as possible.