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Scrolling using high CPU in Lion

K

kopite19

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 3, 2010
133
0
I went into Activity Monitor and my CPU usage was:

% User: 2,74
% System: 2.5o
% Idle: 94.76

I start scrolling up and down a few times and the CPU usage jumped to:

% User: 16.45
% System: 13.98
% Idle: 68.57

The processes that spike are Activity Monitor (naturally) WindowServer and Kernal Task.

I can't remember what it was like in SL and whether this is normal, but it does seem very high cpu usage for scrolling a box...

MBP 2010 13" C2D 2.4ghz.

Interested to see if anyone else has this...
 
kopite19 said:
I went into Activity Monitor and my CPU usage was:

% User: 2,74
% System: 2.5o
% Idle: 94.76

I start scrolling up and down a few times and the CPU usage jumped to:

% User: 16.45
% System: 13.98
% Idle: 68.57

The processes that spike are Activity Monitor (naturally) WindowServer and Kernal Task.

I can't remember what it was like in SL and whether this is normal, but it does seem very high cpu usage for scrolling a box...

MBP 2010 13" C2D 2.4ghz.

Interested to see if anyone else has this...
Click to expand...

My first post. Yes I'm having the same problem straight after I have upgraded to Lion. Any solution yet?

nik
 
nikguitar said:
My first post. Yes I'm having the same problem straight after I have upgraded to Lion. Any solution yet?

nik
Click to expand...

It does it with all the software I have tried so far, including : finder (up to 49%), firefox 5 (up to 70% fan spins like crazy :eek:), sparrow (up to 50%), safari (up to 30%).

Really annoyed here. I'm with a macbook pro 15-inch early 2009, 2.6ghz, 4gb ram.
If it keeps like this I suppose I have to downgrade :mad:.

Any thought?

nik
 
get similar in safari

scrolling causes safari & safari web process to each go to 25% cpu, stop scrolling it goes down again
 
Guess I told this about a trillion times. The new overlay scrollbars are responsible of this.
You can turn them off in the preferences/always show scrollbars.

The overal GUI speed is about 4-5 times faster without the overlay scrollbars.
(According Xbench) but you clearly see a differences
 
Atarikid said:
Guess I told this about a trillion times. The new overlay scrollbars are responsible of this.
You can turn them off in the preferences/always show scrollbars.

The overal GUI speed is about 4-5 times faster without the overlay scrollbars.
(According Xbench) but you clearly see a differences
Click to expand...

how do you turn off scrollbars ?

with each of the 3 options, scroll bars appear when I scroll so i get the same problem

I can only get it to not display them when I am not scrolling
 
Atarikid said:
Guess I told this about a trillion times. The new overlay scrollbars are responsible of this.
You can turn them off in the preferences/always show scrollbars.
Click to expand...

I did it, but still finder kicks up to 68% if I scroll up and down...sigh :(
 
Atarikid said:
Guess I told this about a trillion times. The new overlay scrollbars are responsible of this.
You can turn them off in the preferences/always show scrollbars.

The overal GUI speed is about 4-5 times faster without the overlay scrollbars.
(According Xbench) but you clearly see a differences
Click to expand...

Is doesn't matter how many times you tell us, it doesn't make it true,

It makes no difference to the performance of my system whether they are on or off.

It is still spiking like mad when scrolling up, down, forwards or backwards.

Scrolling appears to be a massive resource hog at the moment.

I am sure it will be sorted come 10.7.1 or 10.7.2

Jason
 
JasonHB said:
Is doesn't matter how many times you tell us, it doesn't make it true,

It makes no difference to the performance of my system whether they are on or off.

It is still spiking like mad when scrolling up, down, forwards or backwards.

Scrolling appears to be a massive resource hog at the moment.

I am sure it will be sorted come 10.7.1 or 10.7.2

Jason
Click to expand...

Some spiking is to be expected. I'm not seeing anything like 50%
of 1 core though, if I rapidly move the mouse wheel back and forth.
 
What is your comps specs? I get about a 1-2% increase in activity when I scroll. Which is completely expected.

Since scrolling is likely a graphics card function (smooth scrolling tends to use opengl or other hardware assisted technology) you may just have a weak graphics card.

My specs are:

Mac Pro 3,1
8-core 2.8GHz Xeon
10GB Ram
1GB ATI 5870HD
Samsung SSD 270 r / 270 w
 
JasonHB said:
Is doesn't matter how many times you tell us, it doesn't make it true,

It makes no difference to the performance of my system whether they are on or off.

It is still spiking like mad when scrolling up, down, forwards or backwards.

Scrolling appears to be a massive resource hog at the moment.

I am sure it will be sorted come 10.7.1 or 10.7.2

Jason
Click to expand...

Well it is true.
Do the test yourself with Xbench.

You will notice the UI index is about 5 times higher with overlay scrollbars are disabled.
It is also verified at the Appel developer program by at least 3 Apple devs.
 
When I scroll up and down, Safari only goes "up" to about 3%. I stop scrolling and it goes down to 0.4%. Scroll bars are set to only appear when scrolling.
 
Same problem with Snow Leopard

In my case turning off smooth scrolling did the trick - just slightly.
 
kopite19 said:
I went into Activity Monitor and my CPU usage was:

% User: 2,74
% System: 2.5o
% Idle: 94.76

I start scrolling up and down a few times and the CPU usage jumped to:

% User: 16.45
% System: 13.98
% Idle: 68.57

The processes that spike are Activity Monitor (naturally) WindowServer and Kernal Task.

I can't remember what it was like in SL and whether this is normal, but it does seem very high cpu usage for scrolling a box...

MBP 2010 13" C2D 2.4ghz.

Interested to see if anyone else has this...
Click to expand...

And this is an issue because???
 
This was definitely also an issue in SL that just got worse in Lion.

I never tried disabling the scroll bar overlay but disabling inertial scrolling will make things a little better. I ended up turning it off in SL for this very reason (even though I really like it but it makes my computer really hot while doing simple web browsing)

I suspect (and I am no expert) that the rubber banding in Lion, which can't be disabled, also uses some extra cpu and this results in the higher cpu usage even with inertial scrolling turned off.

I think this is also the reason a lot of people are complaining about lower battery in Lion. Even in SL if I am on battery I make a point to use the arrow keys instead of scrolling and it makes a big difference in battery times.

I hope that apple can find some way to fix this (not sure what they could do...maybe hardware acceleration :confused: )

PS I am semi-obsessive compulsive about my cpu usage. I monitor it all the time so that is how I noticed about the scrolling...:eek:
 
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