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The most recent update to 14.04 has caused high compiz CPU usage. Running top, I can see that it goes up when hovering over the dock, and if I give focus to Sublime, Emacs, or Gedit, it heads to 50% or more. Once I give focus back to a shell, it drops to a few %.

Resetting unity like this:

unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

did not help.

I was running 14.04 LTS on Parallels 10 for months without this problem, and it started right after the last update.

I also had to turn off Parallels 3D acceleration to get the main tool bar to work, and to get any windows to open up at all. There seems to be some interaction that might be Parallels related.

Any ideas how to figure out what the problem is?

Zanna
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Mike Jones
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3 Answers3

10

I had difficulties with this problem on Ubuntu 14.04. The CPU Usage was charged by compiz over 60 %...I followed the instructions from a Bug-report:

  1. Download the "Compiz Config Settings Manager" from Ubuntu Apps

  2. Run the Compiz Config Settings Manager and select the section OpenGL

  3. Turn the option Sync to VBlank off
  4. Reboot or log out and in.

After this procedure the CPU Usage of compiz is at 10%..

I hope this helps others as well.

Zanna
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  • Do you mean to say to turn it off? –  Sep 28 '17 at 19:42
  • Yes, the option "Sync to VBlank" has to be turned off. Greets –  Oct 01 '17 at 09:35
  • This really helped...but compiz is still taking an unreasonable amount of cpu. Prior to this fix I could hardly do anything it was hogging the CPU so much. Now it is hovering between 80 and 120% on my 4 cpu machine. – snowguy May 03 '18 at 13:08
  • Tried this as a Hail Mary and turning off the vaunt almost instantly made the ui more responsive, so thanks for that. – Kzqai Jul 30 '19 at 19:40
0

I had a similar problem in 14.04. Upgrading to 14.10 solved that. See: Indicator multiload applet causes excessive compiz/CPU usage

Community
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Emanuel Landeholm
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  • Ok, I found a solution after a lucky google search.
    1. Turn off Parallels 3D
    2. Boot
    3. Shutdown
    4. Turn on Parallels 3D
    5. Boot

    For some reason you need to boot with no 3D followed by 3D. It is slow because 3D acceleration is off, but you need to go through this sequence to make 3D work. An update with 3D enabled broke the driver and this sequence repairs it.

     – Mike Jones Dec 18 '14 at 01:13
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I occasionally meet that problem, and I just kill PID of compiz. Everything goes normal

astzls213
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