On 16/03/2017 15:28, Kees Dekker wrote:
I'm running into a strange problem. On my PC (a quad core i5),
Xwin.exe takes (in combination with svchost.exe) 25% average CPU
load. Stopping xwin.exe, also reduces the load to almost zero (if I'm
not doing anything else). The load is mainly on 2 CPUs (almost 50% on
both) and 10% on the other two. Almost all the shown CPU load in
Windows task manager are kernel times (90% of the load).
The way how I start my (64-bit) X-server is on Windows 7 x64:
C:\cygwin64\bin\run.exe /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c /usr/bin/startxwin --
-clipboard -multiwindow -silent-dup-error
The .startxwinrc file contains nothing else than sleep 2000000000
Even if I replace the sleep with xterm, or even remove the
.startxwinrc file (and fall back to the default, i.e. an additional
icon in my system tray), it does not make any difference.
My system is also equipped with a virus scanner, but even if I
(temporarily) disable it, it makes no difference. Xwin still takes
12-15% and svchost.exe takes another 8-12%. This CPU consumption is
almost all kernel times. Even tracing with either the Windows
resource monitor, or sysinternals process explorer does not show (for
me) much clues. The resource monitor shows some disk I/O (< 100Kb),
almost no network I/O (<10Kbps) but sill 25+% CPU usage. The two top
processes on the Windows Resource monitor are Xwin.exe and
svchost.exe (LocalSystemNetworkRestricted).
A check with process explorer learned that almost all load of
svchost.exe Is in uxsms.dll!ServiceMain. Xwin.exe's CPU load is in
ig75icd64.dll!DrvSetLayerPaletteEntries+0x950. Capturing process
traces with process monitor can be done, but Xwin.exe is just a very
few times existent in this trace (that ran for 1 minute). The same
applies to xinit. Svchost.exe is often in this trace, querying files
and registry. But nothing that points to a clue (for me). May be
wmiprvse.exe may also play a role.
This is pretty odd.
ig75icd64.dll is part of the Intel graphics driver (specifically the
OpenGL ICD), which shouldn't be getting called at all if we have nothing
to draw (unless the driver perhaps creates a thread for it's own purposes)
You might want to check you have the latest version of that driver, or
if you have updated it recently, rollback to the previous version.
Given that, I suspect that using the X server option '-nowgl' might work
around this problem.
I know, the above information is vague, but do anyone have a
suggestion/suggestion how to find a root cause? Unfortunately, I
If you can use a profiling tool like Very Sleepy [1] (which can read
Cygwin DWARF debuginfo and Microsoft PDBs) to get a callstack for the
unusual load, that might help in investigating it.
[1] https://github.com/VerySleepy/verysleepy
don't know when this higher-than-expected CPU load occurred for the
first time. The problem became somewhat more urgent as our IT
department moved our systems to a newer virus scanner, that also
seems to take (much) more resources. The combination of these two
makes working with this PC bad.
On 20/03/2017 07:37, Kees Dekker wrote:
Additional information:
- the high CPU load does not occur, when I use (Microsoft) RDP to
connect from home to my work PC. The work PC only shows the high
CPU load when working 'at the console'. This may be related to GUI
settings that are disabled when connecting with RDP (I've to do
more research to understand what is going on here)
Yeah, a different rendering path is probably involved when using RDP.
This suggests that the X server option '-engine 1' might also be a
work-around
You might also like to try '-nocompositewm', as the default setting for
that has changed in the past year.
- attached a cygcheck report (BTW generation took a long time, i.e. 10 minutes
or so)
- attached Xwin.0.log
- attached .Xdefaults
- attached .XWinrc (a dummy one, where host name have been renamed)
- attached .startwinrc
Thanks for these
Reproduction:
1. fresh boot of windows
2. start X-server, by calling: C:\cygwin64\bin\run.exe /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c
/usr/bin/startxwin -- -clipboard -multiwindow -silent-dup-error
3. have a .XWinrc file that contains some menus, like attachment (hostnames
have been renamed here to thumb names)
4. observe the CPU load (as described in previous email)
I am not able to reproduce this problem, testing with W10 and Intel HD
4600. The CPU load from XWin when idle is minimal.
--
Jon Turney
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer
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