hud-service consumes all the cycles on my CPU

[Colin Ian King]

hud-service is consuming every available cycle on my CPU. I have a dual core Atom 450 based netbook - typing phrases such as "image filter" pegs the first CPU to 100% running hud-service and the second CPU pegged at ~30-50% running compiz. When I stop typing this CPU consumption continues on for several seconds afterwards.

This is an insane amount of CPU cycles being consumed.

Attached is a spreadsheet showing CPU consumption. The data is based on a 2 CPU system and the measurements show total CPU consumption for each process. Since two CPUs = 100% cycles, a 50% measurement is basically 1 CPU totally saturated. As one can see, hud-service and compiz are together using ~70-75% of all CPU cycles for several seconds.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Allison Karlitskaya (desrt)]

The hud-rewrite-wip branch that recently merged (and is available packaged for download in the desktop team PPA) already contains some rather substantial improvements. Please test it and report your findings.

There is still quite a lot of low-hanging fruit. I plan to do some more aggressive optimisation work soon.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Hi Ryan,

I checked the latest code in the desktop-team ppa, and the new HUD is using up less CPU cycles now, but at times it can be quite busy. Attached are my test results.

Hardware: HP Mini 210, Atom N450 @ 1.66GHz, 1MB RAM

Test: Type in 25 character phrase and then delete back to leave an empty input box.

In the attached spread sheet is a Graphs tab comparing old HUD and two tests using the new version in the PPA.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

BTW, I'm using the cpustat tool in my PPA to make the measurements: ppa:colin-king/powermanagement - to gather the data I run:

sudo cpustat 1 -q -r cpustat.csv

and then I can import the data into a spreadsheet and plot the graphs. Maybe this can be of use to you.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-appmenu - 0.3.96-0ubuntu3

---------------
indicator-appmenu (0.3.96-0ubuntu3) precise; urgency=low

  * Backport desrt's performance improvement work:
    - reduce hud cpu usage and DoS on long strings (lp: #938584, ##948820)
    - should stop stripping issues (lp: #937020)
    - fixes a small leak (lp: #972354)
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:59:03 +0200

[Marcos Roriz (marcosrorizinf)]

This bug still affects me...

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

This is still a problem in 14.04 when Firefox is running.

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

in 14.04, hud-service consumes 90-100% CPU when firefox is running.

[Hans Baier (hansfbaier)]

Same problem with me. 14.04 consumes 90-100% CPU