I decided that it probably wouldn't hose my IceWM if I killed compiz, so I killed it. I was right. It seems that the system respawned another compiz process immediately, but that process was using 0% CPU instead of 100% CPU. So that worked. It probably hosed the desktop in my office, but I didn't feel like going to the office to see. Maybe someday. I'm enjoying the remote VNC approach. Thanks for all the helpful comments! Mike On Mon, 5 Sep 2016, Andrew Lunn wrote: > On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 02:35:01PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: >> It looks like compiz is running amok and using 100% CPU. That might >> mean that it is using 100% of one of eight threads, or maybe using all >> of one core. > > The kernel scheduler will try to keep it on one core. Migrating it from > one core to another is inefficient, in that it has hot memory in the L1 > cache which is local to a core. Moving it means it needs to rebuild > that. > > http://www.compiz.org/ tells you more about what compiz is. > > It might be enough to log out your desktop session and log in again, so > it starts a new desktop.