metacity process uses 100% CPU

[Alex Willmer]

Binary package hint: metacity

Ubuntu 9.04 beta, metacity 2.25.144-0ubuntu1
After login, Metacity sometimes uses 100% CPU continuously. It does not occur on every boot and I cannot discern the trigger. I don't believe it's compiz related, as I have desktop effects switched off.

[Alex Willmer (alex-moreati)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: metacity 1:2.25.144-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout fuse lpadmin mythtv plugdev sambashare vboxusers

[tjw (tjw-tjw)]

I have the same issue.

The metacity process that you notice using 100% cpu is not the one you are actually using. It is a process left over from an X11 crash, you can 'kill -9' it.

Not really useful, but here is how I reproduce the X11 crash: Run Half Life 2 in Steam (in wine). Exit the game. X11 backtrace points at the nvidia driver, so nothing Ubuntu can fix there, but more info can be better than not enough I suppose.

[Pieter (diepes)]

had the same problem, X crashed/restarted during high disk IO, copying to USB flash + USB hd.
After restart cpu 100%, reading comment above i found 2 x metacity and killed one.
That fixed it for me.

$ ps ax | grep meta
 6494 ? RN 112:55 /usr/bin/metacity --replace
17758 ? S 0:01 /usr/bin/metacity --replace
$ kill -quit 6494

[thewk (theewk)]

I was just about to report this same bug, occurs in Ubuntu 9.04 sometimes. To trigger this no special software has to be used, atleast I haven't noticed.

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

Looks like https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579930

[Babar (babarhaq)]

Does this bug have some thing to do with wine/cross-office? I use M$ Outlook heavily 9.04 and see this problem every now and then. Will try to test this further.

[Alex Willmer (alex-moreati)]

This behavior is not present for me in Lucid, and IIRC wasn't present in 9.10. I don't believe I was not running Wine applications at the time.

[Alex Willmer (alex-moreati)]

Ugh, engage brain. I don't believe I was running Wine applications at the time.

[CNBorn (cnborn)]

I have the same issue that causes X restarts (Jaunty). Not running any specific programs that are obviously causing this problem. I have no wine applications installed.

[dallaylaen (khedin)]

Looks like Alt+SysRq+K can trigger this bug. Can anyone confirm this?

[willdeans (william-deans)]

For me metacity uses 100% CPU because "Wireless Network Authentication Required" boxes appear every "few minutes?" and never go away (unless manually closed). Eventually there are hundreds? of them and metacity uses 100% CPU dealing with them.

You might not notice them if they appear on a different virtual desktop than the one you are using or if the bar showing your currently running applications is hidden or if the number of windows is so large they only appear a few pixels wide in the "task bar" or if you accessing your system via ssh or any other such reason.

In my mind this is a metacity bug but I am sure others would argue with me that what I want is a feature enhancement. Why doesn't metacity restrict its CPU utilization on a per-client bases so that a single misbehaving application cannot bring down the system? Misbehaving applications are AN EXPECTED behavior. If there was some [high] burstable quota this wouldn't be an issue. If the quota is met and the application is throttled an indicator applet could allow the user to change/remove the quota for the application.

cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS \n \l