machine load extreme peaking for short periods....mouse not moving etc.

[NoOp]

On 01/15/2013 02:09 PM, Colin Law wrote:
> On 15 January 2013 21:58, Peter Teuben <teuben at astro.umd.edu> wrote:
...
>>
>> I've done that in these cases, and it's nothing particularly striking,
>> other than compiz at not even 100%
>>
>> My "clicking the mouse" isn't a very reliable way to get the system to
>> respond badly I should add,
>> but it's not like starting some known app, it's when I'm in the middle
>> of something seemingly innocent.
>> Not something that I would expect to eat up my swap.
> 
> Is your swap being used up?  You did not mention that in your first
> post but now you suggest that it is.  Run System Monitor on the
> Resources tab and leave it open to check.

I think Gnome System Monitor takes up too much resource. Even at idle on
this laptop it takes up 27.9 MiB (resident memory), 9.3 MiB (memory) &
up to 22% of CPU. Instead, I'd recommend just keeping a gnome terminal
open with top running. htop is nice as you can view in Tree mode - it's
still less memory/cpu intensive, but running both top and htop is less
cpu/memory intensive than gnome-system-monitor.

> If the mouse is not responding there is something seriously wrong.
> 2GB should be plenty unless you are opening loads of tabs in Firefox
> or have a Flash problem or something of the sort.

+1

I'd guess Firefox & maybe Flash. I say "maybe Flash" because I can sit
on a javascript intensive site with Flash turned off and watch the cpu
crank up to 55%. As soon as I kill the tab with that site or javascript
on that tab, the cpu drops back to normal. Example:
<http://www.calottery.com/>
Open top & set to stay on top (no pun intended), then open that url in a
new tab with Flash turned off. Watch the cpu soar. Now turn off
javascript (Mozilla Prefbar is ideal for this) & the cpu returns to
normal. Turn javascript back on (leave Flash off) and reload the tab...
cpu soars again.

Note that he also has Google's Picasa running as well. Picasa an
definately suck up CPU when it is initially building thumbnails,
building face recognition, scanning directories, etc. (I also have
Picasa installed & use). If not doing those things, Picasa 3.6 & wine
1.4 run respectively well (on this laptop 3G/2.1GHz). If running the
older Picasa linux version, the CPU sucks even more as that version uses
it's own, very outdated, built in Wine engine.

> 
> Colin
>