Excess CPU usage

[Symbitic]

Thanks in advance for your bug report!

• Have you reproduced issue in safe mode?
• Have you used the debugging guide to try to resolve the issue?
• Have you checked our FAQs to make sure your question isn't answered there?
• Have you checked to make sure your issue does not already exist?
• Have you checked you are on the latest release of Pulsar?

What happened?

As soon as I open pulsar, the heat skyrockets and my fans go to 100%. top says pulsar is using 99.7% of the CPU. As soon as I close pulsar, it only takes a few seconds for CPU usage to die down and fans to fall silent.

Pulsar version

1.116.0

Which OS does this happen on?

🐧 Red Hat based (Fedora, Alma, RockyLinux, CentOS Stream, etc.)

OS details

Fedora 40 KDE

Which CPU architecture are you running this on?

x86_64/AMD64

What steps are needed to reproduce this?

1. Open pulsar
2. Wait a few seconds.

Additional Information:

This seems fairly recent as I have been using atom/pulsar for many years without this problem. I'm running Fedora KDE 40 on my Samsung Galaxy Book 360.

[Xon77]

Hello,

I've noticed also excess CPU usage on Apple Silicon ARM 1 with OS 14.7.1, not only at startup, but also when the editor is running.

I often use either Tidal alone or Hydra, and the editor freezes a few seconds relatively often (every 5 minutes).

When I look at the Activity Monitor, Pulsar Helper (Renderer) sometimes goes above 100% for a few seconds, which makes it freeze.

It makes Pulsar almost unusable with Hydra at least on Mac Sillicon.

Does anyone know how to solve this ?

Thanks

[Xon77]

You can find here the profile data where there is a task at the end which freezes the editor.
Hope it helps.
Profile-20241210T193551.json.zip

[savetheclocktower]

Can you test this with either Tidal or Hydra (or both) disabled? Would be good to know whether the culprit is one of those packages or the editor itself.

[Xon77]

I can experience freeze and excess CPU usage, with Tidal alone or Hydra alone, and even with Pulsar alone (less often). It does not seem to be packages. Does the profile help?

[savetheclocktower]

I haven't had time to look at the profile yet, but I'll see if I can do so this week.

[Xon77]

Thank you so much for your help!

[Xon77]

@savetheclocktower and Others.... Did you have some time to identify the reason of CPU usage on Mac ? This excess CPU makes the editor unusable in live performances contexts to me. I can test more and provide more tests if you tell me what to do. Sorry I am not a professional developer.

[savetheclocktower]

Sorry for the delay! The big hiccup in that profile data appears to be related to refreshing Git status on a project.

If you have time to test it, you might want to attempt to work an a project of comparable size to the one that gives you problems, but without a .git folder so that Pulsar does not treat it as a Git project. (You could just copy the folder to a temporary location and delete .git from the temporary version.) Make sure no other projects are open in Pulsar.

There's another issue that affects Pulsar on Silicon Macs — I know because it affected me: any task that requires shelling out via Node (running a process in the background) will freeze for a fraction of a second. This is a bug in the version of libuv used by Electron version 12, and the only fix for this issue is to use a newer version of Electron.

We're working on that; we've got a new version of Pulsar under active development, and you'd be able to try it here — except that we don't routinely build Apple Silicon binaries for this pre-release version for complicated reasons. You might still try the Intel version (which can run under Rosetta) and see if it's to your liking, and whether you can install hydra and/or tidalcycles and have them work properly. I could also walk you through building a version for Apple Silicon from source if you had lots of time on your hands and were particularly eager.

[Symbitic]

I was never using Pulsar as a project editor; only a text editor. Mostly I had files open in my Downloads folder, but I may have had some files open that were nested inside a folder with a .git. Could that have been leading it to try refreshing the git status of every subdirectory it could find?

[savetheclocktower]

I was never using Pulsar as a project editor; only a text editor. Mostly I had files open in my Downloads folder, but I may have had some files open that were nested inside a folder with a .git. Could that have been leading it to try refreshing the git status of every subdirectory it could find?

Possibly, but doesn't seem likely. If you feel like taking 20 minutes to run a quick test, you could find out pretty quickly.

If you can still reproduce the CPU usage, you might also want to take a profile via the Chrome dev tools (Ctrl+Shift+I, choose Performance, hit the circle/record button in the toolbar, do some stuff that triggers CPU intensive work, stop the profile and save it somewhere). I regret not giving you this advice back when you opened this ticket in April.

[Symbitic]

There's nothing that triggers the CPU usage. It happens as soon as Pulsar starts, even if no files are open.

[savetheclocktower]

There's nothing that triggers the CPU usage. It happens as soon as Pulsar starts, even if no files are open.

In that case, you should be able to run pulsar --profile-startup to create a startup profile. The developer tools should start in the open state; once you've got a good sample, you can stop the profile and save it somewhere, then attach it to this issue.

[Xon77]

@savetheclocktower Thanks a lot for your feedback!

I do not understand why "the big hiccup in the profile data appears to be related to refreshing Git status on a project", since I do not use git in the files I used in Pulsar, only files connected to play with Tidal or Hydra.
Maybe, I should send you another profile data?

I've tried the new Pulsar version, although it is compiled for Intel. Unfortunately, I have the same problem of excess CPU usage, which makes me doubt that the next Apple Silicon binary will solve this problem of freezing 1 or 2 seconds each 3 or X minutes roughly. In the activity monitor, I still see PulsarNext Helper (Renderer) going above 100% each X minutes, and the freeze happens.

Maybe I could send you a profile data with this new Intel version, if it may help?
And should I open a new issue, since at least for me on Apple Silicon, I have this issue relatively often, not only at startup?

[savetheclocktower]

Maybe I could send you a profile data with this new Intel version, if it may help? And should I open a new issue, since at least for me on Apple Silicon, I have this issue relatively often, not only at startup?

Yes in both instances. Thanks for being so willing to help us troubleshoot!