High CPU usage inside Xephyr and Xvnc

Question

I have a GUI application that I want to test in parallel by running my tests in different X-servers. To do that I start the application using Xephyr or Xvnc, then I start the script to do the testing, and it works.

The problem I am having is that the GUI application's CPU consumption is very high, when I run it inside Xephyr/Xvnc, such that I can't run more than one test in parallel, because of CPU limitations.

When I run the gui application and check CPU usage with htop, it shows CPU% around 10 to 50%. When I run the same application with Xephyr or Xvnc, it shows CPU% around 200 to 250% (out of 4 CPUS).

Xephyr/Xvnc itself does not seem to add much overhead, but the GUI application, when run inside a Xephyr/Xvnc server seems to consume 5x more CPU than normal. Is there a reason/solution for that?

Answer 1

After some search I found out the problem and the solution. The problem is that the application uses graphics acceleration that Xephyr does not provide. Without it, the CPU starts doing much more work than normally.

The solution was to install virtualgl and run the application inside Xephyr using command vglrun before calling the application.