LXTask CPU % Mismatch

[tenplus1]

LXDE is an amazing desktop environment and has suited my needs well, although I have one odd question to ask, in XFCE the task manager (xfce-task-manager) reported 3% CPU usage when idle but in LXDE (lxtask) reports 13% when idle, which is the corrent number and why are the numbers so different ?

[sportscliche]

Really hard to say without being certain you are making a good comparison. If, for example, you are running the two desktop environments on different Linux distributions there could be a bunch of daemons started in one and not the other. My suspicion is that LXDE is not consuming the extra CPU. Run the `top' command from the terminal to see what the primary processes are. When my LXDE system is idle on an 8-year-old laptop the CPU sits at 1%.

[sportscliche]

The attached image shows part of the conky display from my desktop at system idle.

[tenplus1]

To make the test fair I ran both task managers one after the other on LXDE, this way they are using the same desktop and deamons on startup... LXTask still reports 10-12% CPU usage where-as XFCE-Task-Manager reposts 3-5%... I just dont get it...

[sportscliche]

Oh, OK I didn't understand the original post. I thought you meant that LXDE was consuming more CPU than XFCE on the same machine. I think you mean that the two different task managers are reporting different CPU usage. Maybe it's because the two programs interact with your system differently? When I display them side-by-side on a Lubuntu box running new hardware, they both report the same number to within a percent, likely affected by the clock (display refresh) rate.

Inside both system monitors, you can click on the CPU display column header and sort which programs are demanding the most CPU, in descending order. This is equivalent to what the top command would do. With no other windows open, I see lxtask and xfce4-taskmanager swapping back and forth at the top of the list, consuming about 1% of the CPU.

[tenplus1]

I ran both side by side and sorted the list so that processes using the most cpu are at the top, both lists had the same entries but both reported different cpu usage...

[sportscliche]

Sounds like a bug in one of the programs or possibly the kernel. I'm running LXTask 0.1.3 and XFCE Task Manager 1.0.0. If you have the current versions, then my guess is there is a hardware-specific bug that affects the way one or both of these utilities polls your CPU. I've looked at your problem on two different LXDE boxes both running kernel 2.6.38 and can't reproduce it.

[sportscliche]

I believe the following link describes your problem. Note that Julien Lavergne is on top of it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty ... bug/776776

[tenplus1]

OMG!!! Thanks 'sportscliche' that worked perfectly, it is a bug in the theming and changing theme to a non-animated progress bar dropped my CPU usage to 0% to 1%... Thank you so much... btw, am using Clearlooks and linux kernel 2.6.39