High CPU usage of wayfire in vulkan mode with vulkan effects enabled.

[mark-herbert42]

When wayfire just started - all OK.

Opening firefox with many tabs, thunderbird, etc.

Working for a while.

See 48-50% CPU with wayfire.

Closinng firefox stops CPU usage.

Doing the same with GLES renderer does not show this effect, wayfire CPU is 10-15% under the same conditions and same set of plugins.

[ammen99]

I am curious, what happens without vulkan effects enabled (but with vulkan renderer)? You can also try Sway or another wlroots-based compositor, I have a feeling this is not caused by Wayfire, because if this happens while you are doing normal tasks, then we use wlroots' rendering functions, nothing custom in Wayfire.

[mark-herbert42]

will try it without vulkan-effects. It can be also firefox bug.

[mark-herbert42]

tried without effects - no issue. Issue is coming from wobbly. Trying to move window - CPU usage grows. And it continue to be high if the wobblied window is visible - even when you stop moving it

[mark-herbert42]

disabling wobbly plugin after the CPU usage grown does not help

[mark-herbert42]

Disabling wobbly plugin initially seems to prevent this CPU use growth.

So the way is - run Wayfire in vulkan mode, wayfire take normal 0-1% idling and 10-15% firefox doing something. When idling wayfire returns back to 0-1%. Wobbly firefox window - CPU usage grow, up until 50%. Stopp wobblying - the CPU usage fall back but not to 0-1% but somewhere to 30-40. Start wobblying again - grows to 50, and seems it does not grow more than 50 on my system.

Switch to other desktop so firefox window affected by wobbly becomes invisible or close this window - CPU usage returns to normal.

[ammen99]

Hmm, this is interesting, thanks for the detailed investigation. I'll have to try and reproduce this here though, because I don't have any ideas about what is going wrong.

[mark-herbert42]

Seems to be firefox issue - rolled back from nightly to 146 - and no issues. Still the point is why it happens only in vulkan effetcs branch, because on GLES there is no issue like that.
Will see if the future nightly fixes that stuff.

[ammen99]

Seems to be firefox issue - rolled back from nightly to 146 - and no issues. Still the point is why it happens only in vulkan effetcs branch, because on GLES there is no issue like that. Will see if the future nightly fixes that stuff.

Ah, in this case, maybe on the nightly branch it is constantly creating new buffers instead of reusing the old buffers (this is just a guess though?) - in this case, wayfire and wlroots will start constantly allocating new descriptor sets, and this will make everything much slower.

[mark-herbert42]

So good news - 150-rc1 is stll ok.

Bad news - bad ff works ok with sway, labwc, wayfire gles, wayfire vulkan without wobbly. So I guess when the "bad" ff code will land - most likely ff team will not accet this as their bug because the only compositor not woking with it is experimental wayfire.

The other point - I'v wobblied ff window for a while rizing wayfire cpu. Then closed ff completely and cpu went down to 1%. Then I've restarted ff - and - the CPU returned to 38%. So removing firefox did not clean the garbage that wobbly created somewhre. I had to restart wayfire to clean it. Maybe it will give some clue

Anyway it seems to be on hold till ff release the current nightly as 151 or somethig

[mark-herbert42]

Its not a firefox issue...

What I've tried - open wayfire vulkan effects. Run mate-terminal. Run top in mate-terminal.

Now I start constantly wobblying termnal window. And looks at wayfire CPU use in the top. It starts OK - 10-18% - same as GLES. So when I initally testes that - I tested at thos point, in fact wobbly happens short time. But the interesting point comes if i continue constantly shaking the window/

Next top refresh int is around 28, next - 42, next - 56. next - 68. It is not growing ulmited - at some point it going back and forth but on my laptop it is aroud 60+. So it is bad, very bad compared to GLES.

But here if I stop wobblying - the CPU will return to almost 0 soon.

And what is the difference with FF window - ypu do not need to wobbly it constantly, it will just summarize all your wobblies during some time being. And it will not return to 0 as terminal does - so probably terminal cleans something by itself, but ff keeps those objects for soem reuse (just a guess).

But the issue is within wobbly itself - the plugin seems multiplying some activities (again a guess) and not cleaning them but waiting for the app to do it. Terminal do clean it - so in practical use it is not affecting the CPU visibly, as noone will shake the window for a minute+. Firefox nighgtly for some reason does not - so that's why I've noticed that on ff nightly.

And I have no idea what it can be. GPU usage does not grow in this wobbly process, only CPU affected.

[mark-herbert42]

Latest update - rebuild wlroots from git master + patch for vulkan-effects.
Wayfire with vulkan-effects , wobbly enabled.
firefox nightly tonight (152.a0).

So far - the cpu usage does not accumulate anymore (could be from wlroots internals? ).
CPU usage does grow - if GLES run on 17% CPU , vulkan grow to 60+. But - surprise- battery usage is same.

So seems it is not an issue any more. The only strange thing is why much higher CPU use (by top) does not increase power consumption. Real increase in CPU use will definitely do increase battery drain but here it is not...

[mark-herbert42]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/5340

seem that vulkan renderer is still behing gles2 in efficiency even at wlroots side, without any special fancy effects. 5340 breaks the vulkan-effect patch as well, so seems this is going to be very experimental for a while.

[mark-herbert42]

Unfortuantely bug is still there.

So the experiment - open wayfire/vulkan. Start youtube, watch fhd video - consumption - 6.6 (powerstat log below)
Start wobblying - consumption rises - well that is ok, more things to do, more load. 9, 10 watts. Stop wobblying - all the same as was before. But consumption is 8.3 watts and never go down to initial 6.6 (that is good - same as gles2 case) but continues to cruise at 8.3(a lot worse than 6.6 watts we had initially and GLES2 renderer gives no matter how many effects you had - it returns to 6.6+- whenever you stop wovbblying). So yes - vulkan effects do introduce something eating the battery even after the effects are no more on the screen. Absolutely no issue for desktop - but no-go killer for laptop. 6 watts or 8 watts - a huge difference in battery life/

22:10:25 3.0 0.0 1.4 95.6 0.0 1 10126 1732 3 0 5 6.62
22:10:35 3.1 0.0 1.3 95.6 0.0 1 9586 1527 2 0 3 6.62
22:10:45 3.3 0.0 1.4 95.3 0.0 6 10620 1828 3 0 2 6.98
22:10:55 3.2 0.0 1.4 95.5 0.0 3 9738 1613 2 0 3 6.61
22:11:05 4.2 0.0 1.9 93.8 0.0 2 12175 7218 2 0 1 9.21
22:11:15 3.3 0.0 1.9 94.8 0.0 6 11239 10312 2 0 5 10.00
22:11:25 4.0 0.0 2.0 93.9 0.0 1 12457 9611 3 0 5 10.29
22:11:35 3.0 0.0 1.5 95.5 0.0 1 9827 2184 2 0 3 8.37
22:11:45 2.8 0.0 1.6 95.6 0.0 1 10689 2168 8 0 5 8.27
22:11:55 2.6 0.0 1.7 95.7 0.0 1 9831 2291 2 0 3 8.25
22:12:05 3.0 0.0 1.7 95.4 0.0 1 10460 2231 6 0 7 8.72
22:12:15 2.6 0.0 1.4 96.0 0.0 1 9713 1890 5 0 5 8.28
22:12:25 3.0 0.0 1.5 95.5 0.0 3 9651 1958 5 0 8 8.03
22:12:35 2.8 0.0 1.8 95.3 0.0 2 10878 2216 3 0 4 8.34