CPU Usage 100% XWin <-> 'System'

[Harold L Hunt II]

Tino,

Yes, the CPU usage is normal.  XWin draws graphics using the CPU (it is 
not accelerated by the video card) and we then transfer blocks of our 
bitmap representing the screen to the screen, so XWin tends to take a 
lot of clock cycles compared to Exceed.  Exceed draws graphics using 
GDI, which offloads most of the work to the graphics chip for the vast 
majority of video drivers.

However, XWin runs just fine on most modern machines.  I run it on a 
Pentium III 500 MHz most of the time and I have run it on a Pentium 233 
MMX without any problems.  If your machine is faster than a Pentium 233 
MMX, then I suspect that you have a problem with your video driver. 
See, your video driver can accelerate 'bit block transfers' (blits), 
which takes a large load off the CPU and gives XWin a speed boost. 
Buggy, beta, or non feature-complete video drivers may not adequately 
accelerate blits and may cause XWin to use an excessive amount of CPU 
time on your machine.

Try finding a better video driver, or switch your video card to one that 
has newer drivers.  Additionally, AGP video cards will be faster at 
blits than PCI video cards.  If your machine is just ancient then I 
don't think we can help :)


Please respond to the mailing list with a description of your hardware. 
  I am interested to know what you have got XWin running on.


Harold

Tino Lange wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Today I tried installing and using Cygwin XFree86 to connect to my Linux
> box with KDE via XDMCP.
> Great work, I could manage to set all up in just a few moments! Thanks a
> lot!
> 
> But I realized that it's really a big task for my PC, with Exceed (old,
> v 6.02) I had about 8 MB Memory Usage and just a few CPU cycles. Now
> XWin uses 10 MB, that's OK. But the overall CPU usage goes up to 100%!
> Interesting - it's not XWin.exe that uses that much of my CPU, it's
> 'System' (PID 8), i. e. the Windows 2000 Generic System process. System
> (using 216 kB) and Xwin are on the top of the list, toggling, together
> consuming 100%. If I stop XWin then everything will drop to the usual
> some percent again.
> 
> Is that normal? That much of CPU usage?
> I'm using the lastet XFree86 with Cygwin 1.3.20 on Windows 2000, on
> request I'll post cygcheck.out, if you like to have one for more
> information. I connect to a Linux box (SuSE 7.1) with KDE 2.2.2.
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> Best regards
> 
> Tino