Comment 96 for bug 38131

With regards to my comments above in this bug, I have found my problem. Not sure whether/if this applies to anybody else. I discovered that it is not only Firefox which induces xorg into this crazy cpu state. Xorg would eventually get that way even if I never started firefox, it would just take longer to get there. It seems firefox pushes xorg into this state quicker. Once xorg starts hammering the cpu, then it would not recover no matter what I did. It would not respond to a ctrl-alt-backspace and even shutting the machine down would take ages. The odd thing for me is that I also noticed that this problem only happened at my work where I used my laptop often, it did not seem to happen when I used the laptop at home (I initially suspected some kind of weird DNS interaction).

The problem turned out to be due to my optical mouse. I don't use a mousepad and the particular light pine looking table surface at work caused the optical mouse to hammer xorg. As soon as I pull the usb mouse out, xorg drops back to normal. This problem does not happen any other place I use the same mouse, including at another desk that looks exactly the same to my eye. So simply by using a mousepad now at the offending desk, my xorg cpu problem is solved.