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Recently, I thought that the graphics drivers are the one causing me very huge lags/hangs on my system. But just earlier, I discovered that the process kidle_inject is causing all this troubles. (Upon researching, I believe this was a "feature" of intel_pstate).

While I understand that this does this to keep my computer/processor cool, this very affects almost everything I do that uses much processing power. For example, I'm playing Minecraft and when the processor goes on a certain limit (I don't know what % it is), this kidle_inject processes kicks in (I believe it generates one for every CPU cores I have) and instead of helping with really keeping my computer cool, this makes things worse.

This is what happens:

  1. For example I'm playing Minecraft, and like I said on a certain % of CPU usage, several kidle_inject processes are spawned (4 on me cause I have 4 CPU cores).
  2. Upon spawning of these processes, my CPU usage on my System Monitor Indicator skyrockets to constant 95%-100% which causes very severe lag on my computer.
  3. When this happens, I only resort to opening a tty session. (I just recently knew about this and I still don't know what they are really called). Typing the top command there exposes that those kidle_inject processes eats up at least 60% CPU on each of them, while other processes are low on about 2%-5% only. And that's how I knew that these were the culprit of my computer's severe lag.

I haven't tested yet because I just knew about this earlier, but many times ago, I tried playing Super Tux Kart too (the newest release) and also got those very high CPU % as well plus audio stuttering, and I also get 100% CPU when I just build a project in Android Studio which I believe shouldn't use too much CPU (and I got some settings to improve Gradle's performance too), that I believe this was the root cause too that time.

So is disabling intel_pstate or intel_powerclamp (or maybe they go together?) my only way to solve this problem? Or maybe I can set when that kidle_inject processes are spawned? I've been reading some people that are getting problems with intel_pstate too but all of them (that I remember) are on 14.04 or 14.10 and I'm on Ubuntu 15.04 so I thought that maybe their problems are different than mine.

All help is very much appreciated. Thank you!

Erwinstein
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1 Answers1

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kidle_inject is introduced by thermald and not by the intel_pstate CPU frequency scaling driver. Try disabling thermald. That being said, the intel_pstate driver does have issues, and so if troubles continue try disabling it also, such that you fall back to the acpi-cpufreq CPU scaling driver. (some "how to" notes from another answer)

Community
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Doug Smythies
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  • Oh. Sorry for my bad researching. I'm gonna try this and mark this out if this became effective. Thanks! – Erwinstein Oct 18 '15 at 07:11
  • I know this is a dumb a question but how can I disable thermald without uninstalling it? I tried searching for it but I cannot find an answer. – Erwinstein Oct 18 '15 at 07:29
  • Have a look at [this](http://askubuntu.com/questions/19320/how-to-enable-or-disable-services) – Doug Smythies Oct 18 '15 at 14:36