Cinnamon on Ubuntu high cpu usage

Question

I am using the desktop environment Cinnamon on my 12.10 install. Everything works great, except that it uses an absurdly high amount of my cpu. My third core is always at +60%.

Any ideas?

Solution

Had the same on 12.04 with cinnamon 1.6.7. All 4 cores (i5) were at ~50% constant with strace revealing intense polling activity (futex, poll, recvfrom). Mem usage was excessive too, nearing 2GB virt and ~250MB res.
Searching for cpu at Cinnamon issues suggested it may be related to "Cinnamon 2D", which is what i was using.
Solved it by switching to "Cinnamon" (you have to logout for that), CPU now is below 4%.

Comments

[Linuxios]

Had the same experience. On a one core laptop. Not fun, but I couldn't find any solution. I ended up switching to XFCE.

[Zachary Huffman]

@Linuxios That sucks. It's not a huge issue, but it is a little annoying because my cpu is a little warmer. Hopefully I find something.

[Linuxios]

On a 4 core system it is less of an issue, but on a one core AMD it was a deal breaker. XFCE was a lot nicer about resource usage.

[Admin]

"it uses an absurdly high amount of my cpu" ... What is "it"?

[Zachary Huffman]

@vasa1 The cinnamon process.