Reduce background CPU usage

[probablykasper]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

When I have Zed open, it uses 0.5% CPU in the background. It's not terrible of course, but many apps stay at 0.0%, so an improvement would be great to see

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

No response

[onetom]

I tried zed for the 1st time today and it's eating 3.5-4% CPU, while it's idle, according to the Activity Monitor.
I'm on an M2 Pro Mac mini, running the Apple Silicon version of Zed on macOS 13.4 (22F66) Ventura.
I hope it's not trying to render the stationary text @60fps, since you said, it's "built like a video game"...

[onetom]

If I set "cursor_blink": false, the CPU utilization drops to ~2%.
If I close the built-in terminal, the CPU utilization drops to 0%.
If I only hide the terminal panel, the CPU utilization hovers around ~1.4%.
In either case, the zsh process itself takes 0% CPU, so I see zed being the culprit for this waste.
"cursor_blink": true and no terminal still consumes ~1.4% CPU.
That's a bit harsh for a cursor, which only blinks once or twice a second.

Normally I wouldn't care about such details, but I find these observations being in clear contradiction to the claims I read on https://zed.dev/

[jansol]

To add to this, when the Zed window is not visible (hidden or on a different virtual desktop), CPU use drops to 0.7% on my Core i7.

[onetom]

For the record, I'm still experiencing a fluctuating 0.1-0.3% CPU usage in Activity monitor on version 0.119.17 323fc8a313550101fece9eebe7f4a1c1da03b42f, after a clean application start, when the UI is completely stationary and I have 1 project open with 1 file visible; no blinking cursor.

[bersace]

I confirm this. Just opening a terminal (task or simple terminal) instantly increase CPU usage from 0 to up to 0.19% CPU.

zed 0.145.0 preview, GNOME Wayland, Debian 12 bookworm, Intel CPU/GPU.

I usually need 4 or 5 terminals : magit, 2 foreground services, vitejs dev server, etc.

[bersace]

Actually, I hear the fans soaring even if CPU is such low. I guess that's the GPU who's heating. But using integrated GPU, it's on the same chip/sensor.

[just-maiyak]

I have the same experience as @bersace, my laptop gets hot and the fans turn up after only a few minutes after firing up Zed and turn off moments after I quit the app. CPU usage is hovering 2% the whole time.

[bersace]

I dont experiment this since a few weeks. I dont close terminals to save CPU anymore. I suggest closing this issue. @just-maiyak @probablykasper can you confirme ?

Zed: v0.171.6 (Zed)
OS: Linux Wayland debian unknown
Memory: 15.4 GiB
Architecture: x86_64
GPU: Intel(R) Xe Graphics (TGL GT2) || Intel open-source Mesa driver || Mesa 24.2.8-1

[probablykasper]

I don't see any improvement. But if you're talking about fans ramping up, heating or GPU usage, then that has nothing to do with this issue

[just-maiyak]

I had stopped using Zed for a while, I have been using it again for the past couple days and I notice the issue is now gone indeed