I’ve been noticing an increase in CPU usage by the plasmashell process. Top says that, on my laptop, plasmashell is using around 5% of my CPU immediately after start up and then it grows from there. Within an hour or so, the plasmashell process will be using over 20% of my cpu and my laptop fans begin to run too. My laptop has an 8 core Intel i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80 GHz. I am running KDE Plasma Version 5.4.3 with Qt Version 5.5.1. I have several widgets on my desktop including the CPU Load Monitor and it appears that the plasmoid widgets could be the culprit. For example, when I remove the CPU Load Monitor then plasmashell’s CPU usage decreases by around 3%. Is it normal for plasmoid widgets to use this much CPU time? Also, why does the plasmashell CPU usage increase with time and is there a fix to prevent this? Having your computer consuming over 20% of a very modern CPU’s cycles while doing nothing but running widgets seems a bit far fetched not to be a bug especially since the CPU usage continues to grow past that until I restart plasmashell.
Thanks,
Gordon