High cpu usage (40%-60%) from purely the hyprland process

[Salakksson]

from htop, im getting extremely high cpu usage readings for hyprland (40%+ constantly) on nvidia, and 10% on my laptop
im using the correct kernel modules (modeset=1, fbdev=1) and im using nvidia-dkms 570.133.07-1
i dont know whats causing the high cpu usage, this is certainly not normal

i have this block at the beginning of my hyprland config:

env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia
env = XDG_SESSION_TYPE,wayland
env = GBM_BACKEND,nvidia-drm
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia
env = ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT,auto
env = WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS,1
env = WLR_RENDERER,vulkan

heres the nvidia-smi output:

17:01:24 ~ $ nvidia-smi
Sun Apr  6 17:01:29 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.133.07             Driver Version: 570.133.07     CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB    Off |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  0%   54C    P0             36W /  140W |    1138MiB /   6144MiB |     21%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A             711      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                            35MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A             806      G   Hyprland                                407MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A             859      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                218MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A             870      G   Xwayland                                  1MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            1149      G   ...and --variations-seed-version        281MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           24607      G   alacritty                                40MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           46662      G   alacritty                                16MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Salakksson]

update: i minimalised my config a lot and removed all startup apps and was at 28% cpu on startup (with alacritty with htop running) and when i launched waybar the cpu went to 40, then launching other things didnt change it much.
i do have transparency and blur still enabled but that should all be done on the gpu, i dont see why 40% cpu would be reasonable in any context considering hyprland is supposed to just draw to the screen using the gpu

[vaxerski]

Looking at your env:

env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia
env = XDG_SESSION_TYPE,wayland
env = GBM_BACKEND,nvidia-drm
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia
env = ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT,auto
env = WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS,1
env = WLR_RENDERER,vulkan

1. ok
2. useless
3. bad variable that should not be used
4. ok
5. ok
6. no effect
7. no effect

[Salakksson]

do you see anything that would cause bad performance?

[vaxerski]

what if you remove all of these?

[Salakksson]

removing all of them makes no difference, im suprised considering adding them fixed issues like a year ago when i put them in, idk if they have become deprecated and just dont do anything

[DrTeagle]

WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS used to disable hardware cursors, back when hyprland was dependant on wlroots

[azaleacolburn]

I am also having performance issues in idle. I'm on an apple-silicon machine (2020 MacBook Air) and am using NixOS (my config if it helps). I'm not using any of these environment variables. It's happening both on the latest version of Hyprland built from the repo directly and on the nixpkgs-unstable version. This issue is not happening for me on my NVIDIA desktop machine.

[Sythys]

I am also having performance issues in idle. I'm on a Lenovo ThinkPad E590 running 0.48.1 built from branch v0.48.1-b at commit 29e2e59 I'm running nixos too

[DrTeagle]

try beta nvidia drivers

[DrTeagle]

I say this cause this has happened before w/ someone else and beta drivers fixed it

[DrTeagle]

#9471

[Salakksson]

unless the gpu isnt being used at all (which it is) this wouldnt change anything afaik, i also dont want wierd drivers i need to ensure dont break

[DrTeagle]

it changed things earlier, give it a try, see if it fixes it. What version of hyprland are you on again?

[Salakksson]

i kinda forgot about this, downloading aur/nvidia-beta-dmks arch package currently, and im using the latest version on extra/hyprland (version 0.48.1)

[Salakksson]

reinstalling arch brought the hyprland cpu usage from ~40%+ idle to <1% idle
however i still get spikes up to ~3-10% when typing something and ~10-30% when moving the mouse
the changes from my old install to the new one are:
switched from sddm -> ly
switched from linux -> linux-zen
switched from systemd-boot -> grub
obviously just less packages installed
heres my hyprland config

[MithraicMagic]

Hi guys, just wanted to chime in with my experience. I've had zero issues with Hyprland since I installed it, it ran games fine and all applications worked well. Then today I wanted to play some games, and ran into very high CPU usage from Hyprland when I try to do anything.

I'm running an intel i7-6700k with a GTX-1080. Due to a current bug with nvidia drivers I've set fbdev=0.

Nothing has changed since it worked well, apart from installing Primehack (a Dolphin emulator fork).

[DrTeagle]

does it happen all the time?

[MithraicMagic]

When I don't do anything and just leave htop open, it goes down to 10% CPU usage.
Whenever I move the cursor, or have Firefox do anything it goes up to around 90%, depending on how much is happening on screen.