From time to time, often after I’ve restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.
If I restart, it’s back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn’t do this, but it happens often enough that’s annoying/confusing so I’d like to know if there’s a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow “reset” the checking of these values to make sure that something’s not just being misreported.
This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.
It’s the Linux version of steam taking advantage of idle time to process shaders. It’s a critical part of making all those proton launched games working right. I wish it had better control for when to run it but it is what it is.
If this were true, OP would see Steam as a user-mode process taking up the CPU time. Since the OP image is sorted by CPU time and the process isn’t visible, it’s gotta be those kernel threads that aren’t displayed by default.
Just as a PSA, the feature is currently somewhat bugged and really should be avoided. For anything that’s not a low-end PC, your machine can handle the compilation during runtime easily and do it much faster.
For low-ends, it compiles so many unnecessary shaders (such as all workshop content that you might not even have), it often takes 10x longer to compile everything (which you have to recompile on every driver or game cache update) than just playing the game and watching a replay first or something.
Why does it only use one core?
And why would the process not show up in top?
This isn’t the case here and you can turn the background processing off or change how many cores it’ll use.
“Critical” as in not really needed.
It is very bugged and constantly runs even if it isn’t doing anything. It will also max out your disk IO for hours at a time with an HDD for larger game storage.
I have had it off for 1.5 years across 3 OS installs and have never had a problem with stuttering or shader related problems in that time. It is really not needed anymore for 95% of games since the Linux async solutions were merged.
Maybe if one uses severely out of date kernels it is critical