Kacper Kopczyński writes:

> Checkout configuration of your video driver - X should not take more
> than 5% of cpu when iddle (with some minor effects). Perhaps kde is not
> using OpenGL? Do you have OpenGL enabled?

I'm using ati-drivers-10.7 with xorg-server-1.7.7-r1. No special settings 
in xorg.conf. I never had much success with the open source radeon 
drivers. First they did not run at all, I either did not get X started, or 
I only got a blank screen. One month ago then I had success with xf86-
video-ati-6.13.1, but X crashed instantly when I moved the mouse cursor 
onto the KDE panel. But now I have a new KDe version, so I wil give them a 
try soon.

Wow, at the moment X takes 95%. When I disable desktop effects, it's down 
to 5%. When enable desktop effects again, X uses 60%.

Now I went into systemsettings -> desktop effects -> all effects, and 
played around with the individual settings. When I disable the blur effect 
(two lines after transparency), X usage is at less than 20%. Weird, I do 
not even see any difference this effect makes. Cool, much less X usage by 
disabling something I did not even notice :)

Is 15-25% X usage still too much? I have several plasmoids running, so I'm 
not surprised this eats some performance. BTW, at [*] there are some 
screenshots of my desktop, which did not change much since I did the 
screenshots.

The system already feels better now. But this cannot be the only problem, 
I sometimes (especially during large emerges) turn desktop effects off, 
and when I have too much load, they are turned off automatically.

> Amount of ram you have should be sufficent to compile everything
> without access to swap space.

Damn right. I used to have less memory, and ran very memory-intensive 
applications, and the system was much more responsive than now.

	Wonko

[*] http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-06-19/