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After clean boot with only Chrome running idle, Compiz is taking 25% all the time. It keeps my fan running non stop. Is this a regression or something?

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Same problem here, CPU at 25% used by Compiz, only with Firefox opened. And I have an ATI Radeon card, with fglrx installed. So it seems that it's not related to graphic card... – Pisu Oct 16 '11 at 20:39
To give more information, I have a Macbook Air, 2010, which used to run fine before the update to 11.10. – Luke Hoersten Oct 18 '11 at 1:23
This problem is happening on two of my three different computers. – Luke Hoersten Oct 18 '11 at 17:59
2  
See this bug on launchapad, and register as affected: bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/803943 – Pisu Oct 18 '11 at 20:27
Thanks for the bug report. – Luke Hoersten Oct 19 '11 at 0:00

closed as off topic by jrg♦ May 21 '12 at 20:43

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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

As @Pisu stated, this is now a bug on launchpad.

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I have this as well in Ubuntu 12.04. But Compiz has not fixed this yet! This is disappointing. – gentmatt May 13 '12 at 7:04
The bug reports on this issue are still very active which is worrisome for an LTS release. – Luke Hoersten May 14 '12 at 13:53
This bug has not been fixed for me yet, neither by the linked bug on launchpad. If anyone knows about any other solution, I'd be very pleased to hear it... – Pavel S. Dec 8 '12 at 15:27
up vote 1 down vote

I was having the same issues. This thanks to the PPA of Daniël van Vugt, compiz CPU usage dropped from 40% avg to 5% avg, also GPU temperature dropped about 15°C when idle, and a drop of about 30°C (!) when stressed.

However, the PPA is still experimental and for me it creates flickering when switching workspaces at the moment. The fix is being worked on and it will land in the normal updates if you have enough of patient (more than a month is possible I guess)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/803943/comments/53

Please test my PPAs which contain proposed performance enhancements for compiz and unity. Generally the Unity plugin is the largest contributor to compiz' CPU...

ppa:vanvugt/compiz | https://launchpad.net/~vanvugt/+archive/compiz

ppa:vanvugt/unity | https://launchpad.net/~vanvugt/+archive/unity

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up vote 0 down vote

I think it is because you don't have graphics drivers installed. Try installing the correct drivers for your card and reboot and check again. Compiz is supposed to run on your graphics card but if you don't have drivers it can't run there, so it runs on the CPU.

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The "Additional Drivers" tool shows my "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version current)" activated and currently in use. The high CPU usage would still suggest it's running on the CPU regardless of the driver being installed. Any other ideas? – Luke Hoersten Oct 16 '11 at 19:32
That's weird. I have never had an issue like this. Sorry I can't help further. – Roman Oct 17 '11 at 22:03

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