Desktop Lag With CentOS7/Mate And High CPU Usage

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We have noticed significant desktop/UI lag on CentOS7 workstations using Mate when the CPU usage is high – i.e. the mouse pointer lags and moving windows (e.g. terminal windows) become jumpy (not smooth)

We didn’t see (or notice) this issue with CentOS6/Gnome2

This can easily be shown by running something like ‘cpuburn’
(https://patrickmn.com/projects/cpuburn/) and moving a mate-terminal window around the screen

We can make things ‘better’ by running CPU intensive apps via ‘nice’
(without any noticeable performance hit to the CPU intensive app) – but this is a rather messy way of fixing the issue

We can also make things better by renice’ing X to a negative nice level

However, both these approaches seem wrong to me – as I’m probably missing something straightforward here

Does anyone know of any CentOS7/Mate settings that could be used to improve desktop/UI responsiveness with high CPU usage ?

Thanks

James Pearson

5 thoughts on - Desktop Lag With CentOS7/Mate And High CPU Usage

  • FWIW I recently found that starting from CentOS 7.5, gsd-account/polkitd have been constantly using 10%-15% CPU.

    I dug it a little bit yesterday and found the cause:
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id00161#c3

    Workaround is to disable account password expiration check by removing
    /etc/xdg/autostart/org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Account.desktop

    If you are switching too/using GNOME3 and see high CPU usage. This might be a cause.

  • you’re making a couple of assumptions here:
    1. that Mate is the cause, and
    2. Gnome 3 with the Gnome Classic add-ons is just as good and easy to use as is Mate. I can assure you that it isn’t. It is still Gnome 3
    with all the horribleness thereof.

  • James Pearson wrote:

    Just to follow up on this – we think this issue _might_ be self inflicted …

    When we started moving users to CentOS 7 from CentOS 6, we had reports that things like opening shells, running scripts and similar non-CPU
    intensive everyday tasks were generally ‘slower’ – this turned out to be a result of the default ‘tuned’ policy (‘balanced’) using the
    ‘conservative’ CPU governor setting (we didn’t have any similar CPU
    throttling set up on CentOS 6) – and switching to the
    ‘throughput-performance’ tuned policy ‘fixed’ this issue for us – as it uses the ‘performance’ CPU governor

    However, it looks like something else in the ‘throughput-performance’
    policy is causing (or contributing to) the desktop lag issues we’ve been seeing – and switching to a custom tuned profile (based on ‘balanced’
    but using the ‘performance’ CPU governor) appears to fix our desktop lag issues …

    James Pearson