High CPU usage (v1.x) | Voters

High CPU usage (v1.x)

closed

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

With the launch of v2.x, this bug is now closed — instead, please follow https://screen.canny.io/bugs/p/high-cpu-usage-v2x

April 21, 2020

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

marked this post as

closed

We've now released Screen v2.0 and are marking this bug closed, so we can track all new responses in a new bug report: https://screen.canny.io/bugs/p/high-cpu-usage-v2x

Please update to v2.0+ and follow the above link to stay updated on this bug (which is now the focus of our upcoming v2.1 update).

John Preston

I am on Linux and experience very high CPU load when I am sharing my screen with others. They also notice a drop in quality and 'blocky' screenshare which I think may be due to the CPU usage. When I am a guest and someone else is screensharing performance is fine though. :) Absolutely love this product so far and really happy to see all the work you folks are putting in to squashing bugs and improving performance and experience for everyone. Thank you so much! ✨

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

We just released Screen v1.2, which significantly improves both bandwidth and CPU issues significantly! If you’ve ever experienced an issue with CPU usage, please try the latest update and see what you think. It should be waaaaay better than before: https://screen.canny.io/changelog/screen-v12

Aaron VonderHaar

J Sherwani (Pop Team): Great! I tried v1.1 yesterday and it still had issues with maxing out my CPUs (MacOS 10.13), but tried v1.2 today, and it worked perfectly!

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

Aaron VonderHaar: Amazing, I’m really happy to hear that, thank you for the update!

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

Screen v1.1 is now released, which addresses this issue and others: https://screen.canny.io/changelog/screen-v11

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

We just pushed an update that should reduce CPU usage considerably by intelligently shifting frame rate based on user activity. Let us know if you see any significant improvement, or not — in either case, it would be super helpful to know your experience. If it still isn’t sufficient, we’ll work to add even more CPU throttling. Thanks!

Jakob Holderbaum

Hello J Sherwani (Pop Team) . I have been using screen now several times for pair programming and coaching with several of my clients. I love the product, it's minimal UI and the very reduced set of highly useful features. Unfortunately, as of right now, the CPU usage on my system is pretty heavy. When receiving a screen share session, I get a load average of 5 or more and all four cores of my machine are constantly >50%. This leads to a pretty laggy system, high temperature and high fan noise. 
When sharing my own screen this load got even worse, I could not use my Jetbrains IDE because the system was under such a high load. I don't know if it is me or some issue with the software, at least the HW im using is pretty strong, I have a Lenovo Carbon X1 with an i7-7500U and 16GB of RAM. Attached is a htop screenshot, is there any more information you need?
I updated from the latest .deb on the website, this is what is running:
Client: 1.0.82
App: 1.0.34
Here are some more specific host information:
CPU: Intel i7-7500U (4) @ 3.500GHz 
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620 
Host: 20HR002MGE ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5
Thank you so much for this fantastic product, I love it already <3

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

Jakob Holderbaum: What OS version are you on?

It might be good for us to try to debug this live, if you’re open to it. If so, please grab a time here: https://calendly.com/j-screen/30min

David Vanoni

I'm using Client v1.0.78 / App v1.0.28 on macOS 10.15.4 and see fairly high CPU usage when I'm not using the app at all. It's active in my menu bar, but the app window itself is closed. Let me know if there's any info I can provide to help you debug!

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

David Vanoni: Hmmm, this definitely shouldn't happen! A few questions:
1) Do you happen to know when you launched Screen (i.e. the day/time)?
2) Do you know how many meetings you've been in since you launched it? Which media streams (mic/camera/screen) did you send? Receive?
3) From the Screen window, if you type Cmd-Shift-I, do you see any errors? Please copy/paste the log here (there shouldn't be any personally-identifiable info there — but if you feel more comfortable, feel free to email it to team@screen.so).
Thanks!

David Vanoni

J Sherwani (Pop Team): It appears to behave this way as soon as I open it. For example, I've had Screen quit completely since I posted my previous message, and upon opening it again just now (and closing the window so it's not visible) the CPU is right back up as before.
I opened the dev tools, and I don't see any errors in the console, just the following two lines:
UpdateManagerService: Initializing Update Manager service
UpdateManager: onSetIsIdle: false
I then tried running the performance profiler for a few seconds to see if I could find anything useful. I did then notice a new warning message in the console:
[Violation] 'setTimeout' handler took 614ms
It looks like that's coming from polyfill.js, but honestly I think that might just be a side-effect of starting up the profiler because it happens about 400ms into the profiling session and then never occurs again.
Something else I noticed in the results is that it appears 2 new listeners are created about every 800ms. This looks to be the result of a sizeable stack of function calls (~50 deep in the call stack), so perhaps whatever is happening in that "tick" is just a bit CPU intensive?
I realize this is probably only looking at the "Renderer" process, and where I'm seeing even more CPU usage (~2x) is in the "GPU" process. However I'm not sure about the best way to inspect that on my side.
If it helps at all, I'll send you an email with one of the profiles I captured so you can dig into it yourself.
Let me know how else I can help! I'd love to see Screen really succeed because I was a huge fan of Screenhero. I used it for maaany hours of pair programming. :D I was a little bummed that the version that made its way into Slack never worked quite the same as Screenhero, which of course is understandable given the constraints. (Really enjoyed your post on the insights from that.)

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

David Vanoni: Thanks for all the information. I was able to reproduce the issue, and have just pushed out a fix. The issue was that we were showing a loading spinner animation in the hidden call window on launch, which was causing the excess CPU and wasn't ever supposed to be shown in the first place. I've now removed that, and the fix is now live. Screen should auto update the client, but if it doesn't, you can manually restart it. The problem should then go away for good — let me know if there are still issues. Thanks again for all the detailed information and help, I really appreciate it! 🙏

David Vanoni

J Sherwani (Pop Team): That seems to have done the trick! Thanks for the incredibly quick turnaround on that! 🙌

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

Merged in a post:

High CPU usage

Uberto Barbini

We tried to do pair programming (screensharing no video).
It worked quite nicely but for 2 things:
1-blocky screen every time we changed file (could be related to the other bug on cam)
2-high CPU usage. On my i7 4Mhz linux it was using 22% instead of 14% that Slack screen sharing is using. On my colleague old i5 Mac, it tooks 80% and made the machine unusable, regardless of whose the video sharing was.

April 21, 2020

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

marked this post as

in progress

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

We’ve just released a significant update (Mac/Linux v1.0.27, Windows v1.0.19 — check for updates via Settings, although it should auto-update) which should significantly improve this issue. If there are still issues, please let me know. We understand that this is the 2nd-most significant issue, and if you still encounter high CPU, please write a comment saying so.
On the other hand, if things are now better for you, please also write a comment letting us know!
Thank you for your patience during our public beta 🙏

Michael Bumann

J Sherwani (Pop Team): had a long screen sharing session today and I was pretty happy! \o/

J Sherwani (Pop Team)

Michael Bumann: I did a little dance when I saw your comment. It means that all the effort we just put in over the past few weeks to address this has hopefully made an impact. Thank you for being the first to report a positive experience with the update! 😄 (Hoping for more data from others!)

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