SOLVED! - cpu usage too high, entire system sluggish, top is messed up

[Lord Sauron]

On 6/30/06, Jorge Tomé Hernando <jorge at jorgetome.info> wrote:
> On Fri, June 30, 2006 12:11, Johannes Schill said:
> > Jorge Tomé Hernando wrote:
> >> Solution was indeed easier.
> >> Adding "noapic" to the boot parameters the problem has totally
> >> disappear.
> >>
> > It didnt work for me. I added noapic and it's still between 20-80% all
> > the time.
> >
> > My laptop is a dell inspiron 6000 with an Intel Celeron M360 (1.4Ghz 1MB
> > L2 cache 400MHz FSB), 2gb ram and 128MB shared graphics memory (intel).
>
> I suppose that we are (I was) suffering different problems.
>
> I would like to know which is exactly the effect of the noapic setting. I

noapic?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APIC

> have just read in a forum (related with ESX) that noapic should not be
> used except in debugging circumstances because it sets the PCI interrupt
> management in an old way with some limitations instead of the current way
> (IOAPIC) that it seems to be very better.
>
> I only know that my laptop is totally unusable if I do not use the noapic
> setting in the booting process. I would like to know if using noapic i am
> scacrifying some performance and if there is something (for example
> adjusting some BIOS setting) i can do to fix it.

Check your acpi settings.  I know that for some screwy reason when I
was using Kubuntu on my Athlon64 *desktop* the acpi settings were
slowing down my powerhouse system quite drastically.

Another, more draconian way of dealing with a slow xserver is to kill
everything in ~/.kde and ~/.kde3.5.  I'd suggest backing it up before
doing so, but when I killed those two folders things sped up really
significantly.  I haven't yet located the precise setting that causes
the slowdown, but I do know that KDE has an annoying habit of
murdering itself every once in a while.

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