xorg cpu usage

[deb...@acrasis.net]

After running X for a few hours, the xorg server starts to use around
20% of the CPU. Is that not rather high? The computer is a laptop
running sid.

Here is an extract from a typical htop display (formatted to make it
less wide), sorted by CPU usage:

CPU[||||||||||| 29.0%] Tasks: 246 total, 1 running
Mem[||||||||||||||||||||||||||208/486MB] Load average: 0.56 0.42 0.30
Swp[|||| 153/1463MB] Uptime: 3 days, 22:43:19

PID USER VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command
27837 root 171M 20276 4908 S 25.0 4.1 37:05.50 /usr/bin/X11/X -nolisten tcp
29508 nick 2516 1308 968 R 2.0 0.3 0:01.03 htop
27990 nick 11188 5928 3176 S 1.0 1.2 2:31.75 xmobar
27918 nick 12052 5368 2348 S 0.0 1.1 0:01.71 xterm -class UXTerm -title u

X clients are typically uxterm, iceowl, emacsclient and iceweasel.
Even after closing all X clients except the desktop (xmonad + xmobar)
the X server cpu% remains about the same. The computer is running sid
with kernel 2.6.31-1-686. The device driver in its xorg.conf is
"intel".

The graphics chip via lspci:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM
Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated
Graphics Device (rev 02)

If I quit X and restart, the cpu settles down to around 3% as shown by
htop. But it increases again after an hour or two, with accompanying
fan noise. So far I cannot tell if anything in particular triggers
the increase.

--
Nick

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