please, as the title says, I am having this issue with my new laptop. I have been using Manjaro since its beginnings, have always been amateur diy user, but now I am not able to find a solution on any of forums.
Just a short history of installations:
on the very first installation it all worked as a charm. It was KDE. Then I reinstalled it to adjust the partitions better and the problem already occured, even though all the partitions have more than enough required space.
The cpu goes up while browsing and, if I understand well, it’s related to flash. But maybe I am wrong…
I have tried changing the browsers as well; firefox, palemoon, chromium, opera, brave…
After couple of reinstallations, I decided to go back to XFCE (been using it forever and I like to have thunar root option…) , formated everything, just for the case, but the issue remained. Now, on XFCE, alongside the browser, sometimes XFCE-panel and taskmanager may go a bit up - only a few percentages, but when the cpu is already on 80-90% it is noticeable.
I don’t think you can call that a new laptop, but anyway i have also such CPU on my laptop and experiencing also the same issue with any browser. I think it is just the fact the browsers today need a lot of resources especially for flash or videos. Not to forget the bloated websites, which meant to be user-friendly.
However… one solution could lower the cpu usage: Hardware acceleration.
and post some more information so we can see what’s really going on. Now we know the symptom of the disease, but we need some more probing to know where the origin lies…
An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information as yours just shows the bare minimum… (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
A screenshot of the top 10 processes in about:performance in Firefox would help us too.
I am sorry. I somehow remained noob user. It’s probably because I never had any problems with Manjaro
However, today I was trying out different manjaro editions and got back to xfce again. Now, this fresh installation seems to be a bit faster but have no clue what has cause that. So I am not sure that screenshot will help any.
Opening 10 tabs made cpu usage go high up for a moment again, but this was still faster than the previous installation.
I am still afraid the same will happen again and am providing you with the details you asked. Any hint would be useful.
btw. i cannot install 32bit distro. uefi doesn’t recognize 32bit installation media (although this laptop should be able to run 32 bit OS as well)
Please also, let me know if I can provide more details from the thread you linked me.
Thanks a lot!
agree OP should aim to upgrade to 8GB of ram.
also, newer websites are known for running a lot of java script and this can cause a lot of CPU usage.
To get around this I suggest a few standard add-ons to the firefox browser.
Add block - I use UblockOrigin
Mozilla containers - restricts social media tracking
as a last step you can play with no script it’s a great tool but can take some tweaking to get the sites you want working correctly.
I’ve marked the below answer as the solution to your question as it is by far the best answer you’ll get.
However, if you disagree with my choice, please feel free to take any other answer as the solution to your question or even remove the solution altogether: You are in control! (If you disagree with my choice, just send me a personal message and explain why I shouldn’t have done this or or if you agree)
P.S. In the future, please don’t forget to come back and click the 3 dots below the answer to mark a solution like this below the answer that helped you most:
so that the next person that has the exact same problem you just had will benefit from your post as well as your question will now be in the “solved” status.
I am sorry for bringing this thread to life. I was somewhat busy meanwhile, and before I finally contact acer support (I am not sure that I am allowed to upgrade ram myself, because I might lose warranty) I started doubting that the RAM is an actual problem.
The reason for that is that I was checking full inxi each time I would experience +96% of cpu usage but ram would never reach more than 40ish %. It made me think that maybe that time when ram was at 70% it was because i opened all tabs suddenly and started a video and then ran inxy in a hurry…
However, today I started with home office and am barely managing to have or god forbid participate in video call. Video turns off to save energy (And I need full image of the host because I listen to lectures have to see whats happening on the blackboard)
Then, also this morning, I installed brave browser and managed to participate in the rest of lectures, but still with some further video problem (e.g. at one point I was showing to other participants as if I were in darkness…) with the constant cpu 98-100% However, ram was maximum 45 , I ran inxi at least 10 times
Also, meanwhile, I tested the performance by removing swap and it is slightly better. I also got back to kernel 419, because I read also on this forum some members are having issues with intel drivers on 5xx
This is my full inxy today at 99%cpu with the worst ram/cpu usage:
First of all: Don’t panic when things don’t go as you like
If your laptop is able to run 64bit you should always prefer that. Because your CPU will be able to perform operations more efficiently.
Don’t disable swap because the swap is helping with memory needs when it is needed.
Instead of those browsers you mentioned, try to use the FireFox browser with some addons to block unwanted stuff.
I would suggest uMatrix as a starter, you might need to manually allow certain domains while browsing the site for your video’s but it will give you full power of what scripts are allowed on which sites.
Try to open htop in a separate window to monitor which processes are using your CPU the most.
When you have found the one using most CPU, post it so people may suggest solutions better.
Don’t expect top performance on such an old hardware though.
PS:
Your /boot/efi partition is almost overflowing, way too full for only manjaro
Oof, a Celery. I don’t know what they’re like nowadays, but 10+ years ago, Celerons had pretty pitiful onboard cache, which made multitasking unbearable.
Sadly, your pain is not unique. The modern web is a trash heap of crappy frameworks and all kinds of mangled JS.
I’m sorry, but there’s no fix, other than to:
Stay away from slow websites
Get a faster machine
Kidnap the world’s IT managers and force them to tell their coders to write clean code, and to do ALL of their QC on Celerons, or Raspberry Pis.
Thank you for your response.
I will try to add suggested addons and report back on wednesday, when I again have full time lectures…
Just shortly want to say, since the last suggestions unti this morning I only had firefox with the addons previously advised. However, after even less than hour cpu freaked from ~60% to +95 and coused mentioned problems.
I can easily have back my swap, I left enough free space.
…the processes which are using cpu the most are mostly tabs (although sometimes it seems there are more of them listed than the actual number. even after clearing the cache/cookies). with video meeting (webex) - cca 40%
sometimes xfce-panel goes “mad” up to 20%
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May I just ask a question regarding your PS note. If the boot/efi partition it’s “way too full for only manjaro”, what could be cause for that? maybe there is a clue
… It’s not a problem for me to adjust boot/efi partition, but it was waay much bigger before and there was no much difference in performance. Actually, at this point, my laptop is fastest than ever
ps. ok, I get it, I bought hardware metusalem. However, my previous acer was even older and and had grey hair but did not cause such issues at all, even during zoom calls and paralel browsing… bought the “new” one only because the graphic card was slowly dying…
The fullness of the ESP will not impact performance at all because it is only used to boot from tour UEFI Bios…
You can check by just listing the contents of it using tree for example…
When I mentioned to monitor which processes used the most CPU I was talking about all processes on you machine not just those of the browser.
If the high CPU usage is only while using the browser on certain websites there is not much to do except use a different website with less boatware in the background.
(Some sites perform crypto-mining in background without the users approval)
Have you tried the FF extension “Tab Suspender?” It can help by basically converting tabs you’re not actively using into basically temporary bookmarks, which will re-open the page with just a click.
It can help a lot with pages that are using a ton of CPU/RAM, or if you’re just lazy and don’t want to clear out your tabs YET, but still want some decent performance.