CPU usage goes through the roof

[germain-gg]

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Description

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My mac is unusable whilst being on a Jitsi call after a little while

Current behavior

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CPU usage goes crazy on mac OS

Expected Behavior

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Normal level of CPU usage

Possible Solution

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I don't know

Steps to reproduce

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Joining a video call... and waiting

Environment details

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macOS Monterey. Using the Jitsi electron app, on in browser (chrome, firefox, ...)

[saghul]

What webcam are you using?

[germain-gg]

I'm using the HIIEVPU 2k webcam

[saghul]

When you hover over the local "GSM bars" do you see 60fps? Also, can you take a screenshot of activity monitor, sorted by CPU usage, descending?

Last, do you observe the same CPU usage with the mac's builtin camera?

[germain-gg]

It's actually quite hard to do any task during a call when the CPU is maxed out.

It looks like the video frames encoding on my side is laggy and there's a lot of lipsync for other participants looking at my feed but the same applies to me when looking at the local mirrored video feed.

I don't know what the GSM bars are, but I can tell you that I am far from 60 fps. There's a multi second lag between clicking any button and receiving the feedback

I can not recall whether this issue happened with the mac camera or not. What I can say is that I've been using this setup for 1.5 years and this has only recently been problematic

[saghul]

You haven't answered any of my questions, please try to.

There is a macOS bug starting with Monterey that triggers high CPU usage with certain cameras, that's what I'm trying to figure out here, if you are in that situation or not.

[saghul]

This is the GSM bars, in your local view. What value do you get for fps?

[germain-gg]

I have not yet tested without the external camera, but what I can tell you is that if I turn my camera off altogether, the CPU usage does not go down

PS: You'll see a lot of Element processes here as I was using an embedded Jitsi, but the problem is exactly the same when using Jitsi Meet, Element embeded Jitsi, Chrome or Firefox

[saghul]

That's odd, you don't even have a high resolution!

The kernel_task high CPU usage suggests your computer is struggling with high temperature and throttling down below its capabilities: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207359

Meetings are a moderately high CPU task, but 5 cores are taken away from you by the kernel, which doesn't sound right.

[germain-gg]

That's odd, you don't even have a high resolution!

I fiddled with that setting to see whether it was the frame encoding/decoding that was difficult or not.

Yes the kernel_task does suggest high temperatures, I've tried all the common tricks you can see online like charging your mac using the right hand side ports, resetting the SMC, ...

Are there any extra piece of information that could help you investigate this further? I'm happy to help and dig info as I currently have to take all meetings from my phone

[saghul]

What kind of mac is that?

[germain-gg]

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), i7, 16gb of RAM.

I have just taken a call without an external monitor nor the camera plugged in and the problem did not occur. I'll see if the problem occurs with just the webcam and no external monitor to narrow it down further.

[saghul]

Thanks!

Can you also please do the following? When you reproduce it, open dev tools (same key combo as chrome) and take a profile measurement.