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High CPU usage on Ubuntu-booted external flash drive

ru flag

I'm pretty new to the forum so forgive me.

I have followed C.S. Cameron's wonderful tutorial in which I booted an external flash drive with Ubuntu 22.04 so I can bypass my MacOS during booting and work solely in Ubuntu via this flash drive. The 64-GB flash drive has been partitioned reasonably.

As I start programming in VSCode, four CPUs' usage is incredibly high (~100%). CPU usage will also be very high after I opened a few Firefox tabs, which is abnormal.

I looked up the usage and it shows gnorm and cpp-tools account for the most CPU usage. I have no idea why this would be a problem and don't know how to solve it.

My flash drive is 64 GB. Memory and swap partitions are okay. The read/write speed is supposed to be 5 Gbits. The port is USB 3.0. I use MacBook Air (Early 2015) 1.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5.

Any ideas and thoughts are very much appreciated!

MANI avatar
do flag
i think it is `gnome` (not `gnorm`)? is your flash drive a USB 3.0 version as well? `cpp-tools` looks like a vs code extension (not sure though), can you reinstall it? can you use any alternative lightweight text editor (`gedit`) instead of vscode. i use vscode too but i have a traditional setup on an ssd.
oldfred avatar
cn flag
I have used USB flash drives for years, but recently used an external SSD. Will not use flash drives for boot anymore. SSD is almost as fast as an internal drive. I used M.2 SSD in an adapter. I do use Kubuntu which is a bit more lightweight than standard Ubuntu for both internal drives & my external drives. With flash drives typically better to use lightweight flavor. Are you using noatime parmeter in fstab for all flash drive partitions? Reduces writes which are slow with flash drives.
Ever_Element avatar
ru flag
@ProPlayerMaxUltra Thanks for catching that. `cpp-tools` are indeed extensions from vscode. Reinstalling it might be one option. I'm not very geek so a lightweight text editor may stop me somewhere but it sounds promising.
Ever_Element avatar
ru flag
@oldfred Thank you for the advice. I mirrored and booted an SSD today but the performance wasn't improved. While building projects, the CPU usage of all 4 cores is 100% during which my system froze for some moments. I will hold my hypothesis that something constrains the CPU but reducing writes will be my next attempt anyways.
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