On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 11:06, Segher Boessenkool wrote: > Michel Dnzer wrote: > > On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 00:42, Nirmal Govind wrote: > > > Hi.. I've noticed that the XFree86 process on my ibook is taking up a > > > decent chunk of memory and some CPU and this seems to be slowing down my > > > machine a bit .. when I do 'top', XFree86 is a process that's constantly > > > at the top of the list.. > > > > X server memory consumption is a FAQ and has recently been discussed > > here, but the X server should normally never hog the CPU (and it doesn't > > here) unless there are clients flooding it with requests. > > Of course, notice that the Xterm (or worse, kterm etc.) you're running > the top command in _is_ flooding the X server... :-) > > (I've actually measured this some ten years ago -- the result (on *that* > old system, your mileage will be totally different I'm sure) was that > top+xterm took 10%-20% cpu. top itself *still* takes ~2% cpu on busy > systems (lots of processes), and the Xterm situation has not considerably > improved either, I feel confident in saying).
FWIW, top uses about 0.3% here (the 2.6 kernel might help there), gnome-terminal and the X server less than 1% together. I guess the bottom line is that the X server obviously does need some CPU cycles to do its work. :) Unless it's constantly hogging the CPU, that's normal and shouldn't have a significant impact on overall system performance. The kernel scheduler and VM are much more likely to matter there. -- Earthling Michel Dänzer \ Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer Software libre enthusiast \ http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer