X and plasma-desktop using a lot of CPU [Solved]

[wyohman]

This just started happening even though I made no changes that I can think of. Both X and plasma-desktop are using 85% and 35% respectively. If I kill plasma-desktop, everything goes back to normal until I restart plasma-desktop.

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers.

[tuxalish]

The exact same thing happened to me about 2 weeks ago. As you, I made no changes that I could think of either. The first thing I did was to create a new user (from e17 cause I couldn't do anything in KDE4). Well, that worked, everything back to normal in the new KDE4 user. It was still bugging me though so I navigated to old user and renamed the .kde4 folder in home to .kde4.broke. I logged in to the old user and it was back to normal, except I had lost all my settings. I wish now that I had renamed the .kde4 folder first before adding a second user.

[wyohman]

Turns out it was the System Tray. Apparently under Information - Icons, if you have Application Status and Hardware Control turned off, the CPU usage shoots through the roof. Strange!

Cheers.

[muungwana]

it is always a good idea to have a backup copy of .kde folder, you never know when you might need it