How can I find out what ibus-daemon and ibus-ui-gtk3 are doing?

Question

Occasionally my desktop slows down a lot. The mouse pointer moves slowly or not at all, my fan starts whirring, and the end is generally nigh. If I'm very patient normality usually restores itself, but this happens daily.

Recently when it happened I switched to a TTY (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and ran top. It revealed that the processes ibus-daemon and ibus-ui-gtk3 were using 99% and 100% of the CPU respectively.

Maths notwithstanding, how can I find out what these processes are doing at the time?

Solution

This is the intelligent input bus - is an input method framework for multilingual input. If you don't use any different keyboard layouts for ex. japanese /asian etc.

Try to disable it in System Setting -> Language (something like input method from ibus to none)

Try to killall ibus-daemon and tell us if cpu is still has a high load.

Comments

[lofidevops]

seems to be related to bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ibus/+bug/1276186 (but I am asking how to investigate on my machine, not posting as a bug report)

[Eero Aaltonen]

For the record, I believe top reports cpu usage per core. 200 % usage is perfectly possible, if you have two or more cores.

[lofidevops]

@EeroAaltonen ah, mystery solved :)

[lofidevops]

thanks for explaining what it is and why I might want to disable it; I don't need multilingual input so I have disabled it and the slowdown seems to have stopped

[Brent Bradburn]

How to change “Keyboard Input Method System” to “None” in Ubuntu GNOME?