Cinnamon: Cinnamon 3.2.7 - LM 18.1 : High CPU usage until I restart Cinnamon

[Booteille]

Hi.

As said in the title, Cinnamon is using a lot of CPU usage until I restart it through Cinnamon Debugger ([Window] + [L] => Restart Cinnamon).

The CPU is getting used a lot since the beginning of the session.

Here are two screens of htop:

After I restarted Cinnamon:

[JosephMcc]

Try disabling applets like the system monitor applet and see if that has any effect.

[Booteille]

Oh, sorry. i fogot to tell you I already did it by the past.

Here is another screen with system monitor applet removed.

I would like to notice I just started the session and did NOTHING except open the terminal and run htop.

[leigh123linux]

@Booteille Why do you have several cinnamon processes running?

[Booteille]

I don't know. That's what happens when I start the session.

I only get one once I run cinnamon --replace though.

[leigh123linux]

Can you create a test user account and try logging into it to see if it's a config issue.

[Booteille]

I am stupid. I didn't think about that simple thing, sorry.

I created another user and he has not the issue.

I am trying to change settings of this new user to copy those I actually have.

BTW, you can notice the test user launch Cinnamon with "cinnamon --replace" command instead of "cinnamon" as my main user.

[Booteille]

Okay. I just noticed Cinnamon was set to start on Software Rendered mode on the login screen.
The high cpu usage was related to this fact. Once I selected "Default Session" or "Cinnamon" instead of "Cinnamon Software Rendered" on the login screen, everything got better.

I am sorry for the waste of time. I should've think about those things before posting.

[ECipolatti]

@Booteille how do u change it? i mean i want to do the same as you, but i dont know how.

[JMIsham]

click the round icon next to the username

[ECipolatti]

i already do that, even i have it on default, but keeps getting 15% of my CPU :(

[diveyez]

Same, still high cpu usage by cinnamon --replace
Tried all my normal fixes, nothing works. I might move to gnome due to this. Dont like it.

[gatopeich]

I am in the same situation, Cinnamon taking ~5% CPU continuously on a 8-core system.

• strace shows many calls to recvmsg on socket @/tmp/.X11-unix/X0
• perf top shows cinnamon mostly busy on g_source_iter_next

However the problem seems to be pulseaudio's CPU hunger apparently due to busy polling on output devices. It was using up to 9% CPU on the same system.
After some tinkering I decided to remove pulseaudio and cinnamon CPU use went down to 1~3%.

[educatedwarrior]

Why does Linux audio suck so bad. Any suggestions to improve. Any good proprietary drivers? Thinking about getting a good sound card.

[gatopeich]

Why does Linux audio suck so bad. Any suggestions to improve. Any good proprietary drivers?

Probably because there is no money behind its development, unlike most good-working Linux stuff. Quality work needs to be paid for.

BTW after fully uninstalling Pulse Audio I found too many things depended on it to work as expected in my desktop so I ended up re-installing. And this second time it did not seem to waste so much CPU.

Anyway cinnamon seems to be wasting CPU in some busy polling cycle:
$ perf top -g -s overhead,comm,dso,sym Samples: 87K of event 'cycles:ppp', Event count (approx.): 9239167206, Thread: cinnamon Overhead Command Shared Object Symbol 7.70% cinnamon libglib-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] g_source_iter_next 0.96% cinnamon libglib-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] g_main_context_prepare 0.87% cinnamon libglib-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] g_main_context_check 0.24% cinnamon libglib-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] g_hash_table_lookup 0.13% cinnamon ld-2.23.so [.] _dl_find_dso_for_object 0.13% cinnamon libgobject-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] handlers_find 0.13% cinnamon libclutter-1.0.so.0.2400.2 [.] clutter_actor_get_transformed_paint_volume 0.12% cinnamon libgobject-2.0.so.0.4800.2 [.] g_type_check_instance_is_a

[gitlui]

For me this was exactly the Problem. My kid must have changed it by spamming the keyboard on the login screen. Thank you very much!

[sebaplaza]

Okay. I just noticed Cinnamon was set to start on Software Rendered mode on the login screen.
The high cpu usage was related to this fact. Once I selected "Default Session" or "Cinnamon" instead of "Cinnamon Software Rendered" on the login screen, everything got better.

I am sorry for the waste of time. I should've think about those things before posting.

Thanks @Booteille ! It's works !
I've been searching for months the origin of this problem.