Latte Dock randomly takes up huge amount of CPU

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1

I just installed Manjaro Plasma, and got the Latte dock from the Pamac store.

The Latte dock, however, has been at times behaving weird, like not revealing itself when I close all windows, showing extreme stuttering when animating stuff, and so on. So I pulled out HTop, and it says 50% of the CPU is being used by Latte. There isn’t a way to upload the screenshots because the forum won’t allow me to.

When I interact with Latte, the CPU usage shoots up to the 70s and 80s. This is affecting the whole desktop (it’s becoming slow). Is there any fix for this?

I’m on Latte-dock 0.9.11

2

At first glance its hard to know whether this is a bug in latte or misconfiguration or simply a lack of resources.
It should be noted Latte takes a decent amount - like a whole other Desktop Environment on top of Plasma kind of amount.

Maybe start here (and provide system info):
How to provide good information

3

Sorry about that. I figured you’d be able to get my system specifications from what I entered while registering. neofetch -
OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64
Host: Aspire A515-51 V1.17 Kernel: 5.9.11-3
MANJARO Uptime: 4 hours, 45 mins Packages: 1345 (pacman), 10 (snap) Shell: bash 5.0.18 Resolution: 1366x768
DE: Plasma 5.20.4
WM: KWin
WM Theme: Edna
Theme: Breath2 [Plasma], Default [GTK2/3]
Icons: breeze-dark [Plasma], breeze-dark [GTK2/3]
Terminal: yakuake
CPU: Intel i5-8250U (8) @ 1.600GHz
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620
Memory: 2834MiB / 7835MiB

4

Its ok, but I didnt ask for that.
Please see the link.

5

Output from inxi -

System:
  Kernel: 5.9.11-3-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 10.2.0 
  parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.9-x86_64 
  root=UUID=74973ae0-850b-48be-a8ca-2262e43a9122 rw quiet apparmor=1 
  security=apparmor udev.log_priority=3 
  Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.20.4 tk: Qt 5.15.2 info: latte-dock wm: kwin_x11 
  dm: SDDM Distro: Manjaro Linux 
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Acer product: Aspire A515-51 v: V1.17 serial: <filter> 
  Mobo: KBL model: Charmander_KL v: V1.17 serial: <filter> UEFI: Insyde 
  v: 1.17 date: 03/20/2018 
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 34.0 Wh condition: 41.8/48.9 Wh (85%) volts: 16.0/15.2 
  model: LG 004B384234314341 type: Li-ion serial: <filter> status: Discharging 
CPU:
  Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i5-8250U bits: 64 type: MT MCP 
  arch: Kaby Lake family: 6 model-id: 8E (142) stepping: A (10) microcode: E0 
  L2 cache: 6144 KiB 
  flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx 
  bogomips: 28808 
  Speed: 1600 MHz min/max: 400/1600 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1273 2: 1589 
  3: 1592 4: 1583 5: 1229 6: 972 7: 1540 8: 1569 
  Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: KVM: VMX disabled 
  Type: l1tf 
  mitigation: PTE Inversion; VMX: conditional cache flushes, SMT vulnerable 
  Type: mds mitigation: Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable 
  Type: meltdown mitigation: PTI 
  Type: spec_store_bypass 
  mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp 
  Type: spectre_v1 
  mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization 
  Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Full generic retpoline, IBPB: conditional, 
  IBRS_FW, STIBP: conditional, RSB filling 
  Type: srbds mitigation: Microcode 
  Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected 
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 620 vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: i915 
  v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 chip ID: 8086:5917 
  Device-2: Sunplus Innovation HD WebCam type: USB driver: uvcvideo 
  bus ID: 1-7:3 chip ID: 1bcf:2ca0 
  Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.10 compositor: kwin_x11 driver: intel 
  unloaded: modesetting alternate: fbdev,vesa display ID: :0 screens: 1 
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1366x768 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 361x203mm (14.2x8.0") 
  s-diag: 414mm (16.3") 
  Monitor-1: eDP1 res: 1366x768 hz: 60 dpi: 102 size: 340x190mm (13.4x7.5") 
  diag: 389mm (15.3") 
  OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.2.3 
  direct render: Yes 
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI 
  driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel alternate: snd_soc_skl bus ID: 00:1f.3 
  chip ID: 8086:9d71 
  Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.9.11-3-MANJARO 
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet 
  vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: r8169 v: kernel port: 3000 
  bus ID: 01:00.1 chip ID: 10ec:8168 
  IF: enp1s0f1 state: down mac: <filter> 
  Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter 
  vendor: Lite-On driver: ath10k_pci v: kernel port: 3000 bus ID: 02:00.0 
  chip ID: 168c:0042 
  IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: <filter> 
  Device-3: Lite-On Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 Bluetooth type: USB driver: btusb 
  bus ID: 1-5:2 chip ID: 04ca:3015 
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 931.51 GiB used: 25.43 GiB (2.7%) 
  SMART Message: Unable to run smartctl. Root privileges required. 
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Toshiba model: MQ04ABF100 size: 931.51 GiB 
  block size: physical: 4096 B logical: 512 B speed: 6.0 Gb/s 
  rotation: 5400 rpm serial: <filter> rev: 1J scheme: GPT 
Partition:
  ID-1: / raw size: 931.22 GiB size: 915.60 GiB (98.32%) 
  used: 25.42 GiB (2.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 
Swap:
  Alert: No Swap data was found. 
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8 C mobo: 27.8 C 
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:
  Processes: 231 Uptime: 5h 25m Memory: 7.65 GiB used: 2.50 GiB (32.7%) 
  Init: systemd v: 246 Compilers: gcc: 10.2.0 clang: 11.0.0 Packages: 1355 
  pacman: 1345 lib: 374 flatpak: 0 snap: 10 Shell: Bash v: 5.0.18 
  running in: konsole inxi: 3.1.08

Would you need the output of dmesg as well?

1 Like
6

Thats OK … I just wanted the fuller snapshot.

For example I notice your BIOS is a bit old.
(also you have no SWAP … while that is likely unrelated, is that intentional?)

I dont see anything else really jumping out at me except that you are using the i915 (or ‘intel’) driver as opposed to the newer modesetting … you may wish to check your experience between the two.

Which makes me wonder … is the issue with hardware-acceleration possibly?
Also maybe check OpenGL version 3.1 in compositor settings (I believe 2.0 is still default).

2 Likes
7

I’ll try updating the BIOS.
I have no swap because I didn’t see (or look for) an option to allocate swap memory during the installation. I haven’t created a swap partition manually yet, as it is a fresh install. I’ve set the render back-end to OpenGL 3.1 already.
I’ll look into the driver thing you mentioned as well, though I don’t really understand what you meant. How do I switch my driver to the newer thing you mentioned?

8

May try the latte-dock-git in The AUR (not in the offical repos this one is a bit older) You have to enable AUR( Arch User Repository) in the Pamac settings.

9

I uninstalled Latte Dock (Just too frustrating to try and fix). But my task bar (plasma panel) is still very laggy. The Manjaro start menu, the settings application and all the plasma widgets stutter a lot, and take at least two seconds to appear. Htop now says plasmashell is using over half my CPU. I can’t update my BIOS, because I don’t know how to on a Linux machine. My laptop came with Ubuntu, but Acer has BIOS upgrade support only for Windows. Also, I can’t launch applications from the start menu because it keeps greying out and saying ‘Applications updated’.

10

… I wonder … do you happen to have kde-git packages?

pacman -Qqs '\-git'
11

Yep

$ pacman -Qqs '\-git'
attica-git
karchive-git
kauth-git
kbookmarks-git
kcodecs-git
kcompletion-git
kconfig-git
kconfigwidgets-git
kcoreaddons-git
kcrash-git
kdbusaddons-git
kglobalaccel-git
kguiaddons-git
ki18n-git
kiconthemes-git
kio-git
kitemviews-git
kjobwidgets-git
knotifications-git
kservice-git
ktextwidgets-git
kwallet-git
kwidgetsaddons-git
kwindowsystem-git
kxmlgui-git
solid-git
sonnet-git
user-manager-git
12

I highly suggest replacing all of those with their non-git equivalents.
(in the case of user-manager-git it should probably just be removed - there is no equivalent as plasma-desktop already provides it.)

I think you probably fell victim to this:

13

Thank you very much, @cscs.

pamac install attica karchive kauth kbookmarks kcodecs kcompletion kconfig kconfigwidgets kcoreaddons kcrash kdb
usaddons kglobalaccel kguiaddons ki18n kiconthemes kio kitemviews kjobwidgets knotifications kwidgetsaddons kwindowsyst
em kxmlgui solid sonnet

and a reboot solved my problems. Quite interesting, though, that such a problem would manifest itself on a fresh install.

14

See the link I shared to the other thread.
There was an overlooked deprecated package in the KDE profile … which then ended up nabbing the git version, which created a dep cycle for a bunch of kde-git packages.
This affected all released plasma ISO’s, including stable and rc, as well as Architect installs.
It has been subsequently fixed.

15

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