Xorg with ATI / RV370 sneakily eats half my CPU with empty screen?

[Frank de Lange]

John Clarke wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> Following an upgrade to Suse 11.1 I find that Xorg is eating my CPU alive.  Here's the output from "top":
> 
> 28834 johncc    20   0 1437m 615m 298m R 98.2 15.5 794:20.69 isis
>  3103 root      20   0  748m 398m 7072 S  1.7 10.1   1080:03 Xorg
> 
> I don't know how the massive Xorg usage gets clocked up - I never see more than 1-2% used, but nonetheless next morning there it is and my batch jobs are taking twice as long to run.
> 
> There is no display stuff going on at all.  Screensaver is now a simple black screen (although that made no difference) and the batch jobs are compute only, no graphics.  Basically only the clock is changing.
> 
> Google didn't turn up anything useful - I don't even know how to increase the logging level to tell me what Xorg is doing.
> 
> Please help, I'm going mad.
> Thanks
> John

Can you log in remotely to this machine so that you can observe X while
it is in the screensaver? It sounds strange that you never observe more
than 1-2% but it still seems to chew so much time. Maybe that simple
black screensaver still makes X go bezerk...

Cheers//Frank