LazyWeb: Why does WindowServer on OSX always use 30% of my CPU?

September 21, 2005 in apple

For some reason my OS X box is always using 30% of my CPU. It just sits while the box is doing nothing wasting my processor.

I think it has something to do with Desktop Manager which I can’t live without.

Anyone else have this problem. It’s becoming seriously annoying.

6 Replies

k g
October 29, 2005 at 7:02 pm

Yeah, I have an ibook g4 1.33 Ghz w/768 Mb real ram running tigger. I notice windowserver does seem to suck up to 30% cpu. My complaint is the stupid sticky drag drop button thing. I am writing my thesis in word 2004 and chemdraw ultra 8. When I drag structures & reaction schemes between documents, the computer will go stupid & numb and sometimes do retarded stuff (like make the crummy spinning colored lollypop, or the evil, dreaded watch pop up on the screen) and I have to wait for it to stop being lame and annoying and wanting to crash and eat my data that I haven’t saved. The problem seemed to get worse after I installed crummy crappy mac classic os 9 piece of junk to run some old software that I need to use. I don’t know if windowserver is related to any of those other applications, but I do know I had to reboot my computer more in the first week it had the mac os 9 virus on it than I had to reboot my computer the first 3 months I had it. And the only time I had to reboot it was when I installed the software updates.
Kevin Burton
October 29, 2005 at 7:16 pm

Yeah.. I have similar issues. I don’t know what’s causing it because OSX hides all the internals from me. Linux was buggy but at least I knew how it worked.

OSX is making me lazy.

I do know that after a reboot all these problems seem to go away.
Ilgaz
November 5, 2005 at 12:44 am

Virtual Desktop is “innocent”. Do you have grammarian pro installed?
kg
November 8, 2005 at 3:59 pm

From what I’ve found, I believe windowserver is the parent process that all the other gui children come from. One thing I noticed is that when I went into activity monitor, I noticed the active dashboard components have clients that are always using memory. Each client was burning up about 10mb ram & 100mb virtual memory. When I closed the 3 active components I didn’t use, this seemed to let chemdraw run faster. The user interface is so crappy in chemdraw, you need any extra speed you can get. I don’t know how this will work in the long run, because I have only been using my computer like this for about 10 hours. I don’t turn off my computer, I just put it to sleep & charge the battery @ night. One thing I noticed is when I have to reboot it, the trash is full of crap that was rescued from chemdraw & word. Again, I didn’t notice these issues until I loaded that worthless barking dog os9.
kg
November 8, 2005 at 4:00 pm

From what I’ve found, I believe windowserver is the parent process that all the other gui children come from. One thing I noticed is that when I went into activity monitor, I noticed the active dashboard components have clients that are always using memory. Each client was burning up about 10mb ram & 100mb virtual memory. When I closed the 3 active components I didn’t use, this seemed to let chemdraw run faster. The user interface is so crappy in chemdraw, you need any extra speed you can get. I don’t know how this will work in the long run, because I have only been using my computer like this for about 10 hours. I don’t turn off my computer, I just put it to sleep & charge the battery @ night. One thing I noticed is when I have to reboot it, the trash is full of crap that was rescued from chemdraw & word. Again, I didn’t notice these issues until I loaded that worthless barking dog os9.
Greg Devens
June 4, 2006 at 3:22 pm

I have recently - since the use of a camcorder and the various apps involved - that my HD memory has collapsed to just over 1 of 55 gb! Trackpad is behaving erratically despite refinement. WindowServer takes up at least 40 pct. CPU.