So, Was Compiz the Problem?

For about 2 weeks now, maybe more and not less, my main PC has been possessed. To my knowledge, I hadn't made any changes that should affect performance, certainly not affect it so drastically; but I know enough about computing to know, a shrug doesn't mean I'm not the catalyst.

It did mean, however, that my computer's system load was flying skyward at random times, even after I'd been asleep for many hours, with no apparent cause. And it also meant I had no idea what I was going to do about it.

When succeeding at your life's dreams revolve around being at a functional computer for almost every waking hour of every day, it can be very scary waking up to a computer whose system load is at 12 with the disk chugging away as if you were simultaneously compiling twenty huge pieces of software.

And it's hellaciously frustrating to be in the middle of working on something, and to watch your load suddenly rise, and continue rising, no matter what apps you shut down.

• Switching from Chrome Beta to the stable branch had no effect.
• I already tended to run metacity --replace whenever logging into Xorg.
• Updating my video driver had no effect.
• I've been watching my load and logs like a hawk - nothing suspicious except false alarms.

The worst of it may finally be over. Coming to suspect Google Chrome to be the bad guy in this story, I went searching Google's Help sites, which is when I noticed: part of their standard prompt, when you post a question, seems to include, "is Compiz enabled?"

I had recently done a sudo apt-get remove compiz a couple days ago, and my eyebrows were tweaked because right after rebooting, I was straight into compiz. Which I had just uninstalled, right? Nope.

As explained by ubuntuforums.org user "Psumi" in this thread, the real magic is: sudo apt-get purge compiz-core. So far, the performance gain seems huge, but it'll be a few hours before I'm certain that my computer isn't just biding its time before it blows a volcano of hot fluid load all over me.

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