DisplayLink Software - High CPU on MBA

[FoxBJK]

Bumping this up. 2015 MacBook Air, D3100 dock, u3415w monitor (made by Dell), but the CPU usage is way up there. My computer’s getting alarmingly warm during anything graphics-heavy like video playback.

Plugging the monitor directly into the Mac via DisplayPort is substantially better, so there’s definitely a problem with the dock or the driver. Probably the driver, because I was using this dock with an XPS earlier this week with no issues.

Keeping the DisplayPort cable plugged in for now, but hopefully there’ll be a performance improvement in the future.

[rich2019]

This is repeatable on my MacBook Pro 2012 using Mac Screen Sharing to VNC to another machine. If the other machine is doing frequent updates (eg like some redrawing of part of a webpage, a very common occurence), then the CPU will go insane on my Mac.

I have looked at Activity Monitor to see that, in this order, the following are consuming CPU:
a. WindowServer (insanely active)
b. DisplayLinkManager (insanely active)
c. Screen Sharing (insanely active)
d. kernel_task
e. DisplayLinkUserAgent (not very busy)

DisplayLinkManager and Screen Sharing are hogging about the same amount of CPU.

I tried running Quartz Debug to see when screen updates were occurring but this irritatingly doesn't work over DisplayLink, so I have no idea whether the Screen Sharing is refreshing its view far too often (I am using adaptive quality, not full), causing DisplayLinkManager to try and push these updates through to the WindowServer, causing a global system slow down.

I also tried running Instruments and looking at DisplayLinkManager. Nothing of note comes up in that other than some secondary thread is very very busy, but as it is not a debug build I cannot see what it is actually doing.

Your developers will be able to repeat this very easily by doing the above!!! It seems that the entire screen is being polled to be pushed out to the external DisplayLink hardware, without any form of acceleration.

Is there any fix for this? I have recently bought this DisplayLink device and am quite disappointed by the CPU hogging that is occurring.

[jims]

Unfortunately their business model relies on people not knowing that the DisplayLink architecture has severe fundamental performance issues. I doubt they will fix this.

[dlinkdaddy]

Originally Posted by rich2019

This is repeatable on my MacBook Pro 2012 using Mac Screen Sharing to VNC to another machine. If the other machine is doing frequent updates (eg like some redrawing of part of a webpage, a very common occurence), then the CPU will go insane on my Mac.

I have looked at Activity Monitor to see that, in this order, the following are consuming CPU:
a. WindowServer (insanely active)
b. DisplayLinkManager (insanely active)
c. Screen Sharing (insanely active)
d. kernel_task
e. DisplayLinkUserAgent (not very busy)

I'm running DisplayLink version 5.2 under Mojave 10.14.6 on the 2017 13'' MacBook Pro and I'm experiencing the exact same issues under the same circumstances.

[allanamiller]

I had this problem and discovered that disabling Night Shift made it go away. Presumably there is some bug in the driver that is tickled by that, although clearly that may not be the only cause. YMMV.

[D43m0n]

Originally Posted by tommiy

With NightShift turned off I have had 2 days without High CPU issues on WindowServer process (and subequently the 100% CPU utilisation by DisplayLink). Seems that Apple is correct and they have broken the NightShift process on 18G95. Server me right for installing the supplementary updates.

No patch expected from Apple on Mojave. Catalina is a hope they may fix it.

Originally Posted by allanamiller

I had this problem and discovered that disabling Night Shift made it go away. Presumably there is some bug in the driver that is tickled by that, although clearly that may not be the only cause. YMMV.

I'm experiencing the same thing with the same results when you disable Night Shift on Mojave 10.14.16 and with the

5.2.1 beta 3 DL drivers installed. Disable Night Shift -> DisplayLinkManager CPU usage drops from around 100% to around 4 ~ 8%

Some colleagues have upgraded to Catalina 10.15.1 and suggest in general to wait, without focusing on DisplayLinkManager and CPU usage, just in general to wait with updating to Catalina. So that's what I'll be doing (crashed and burned before )

[wild4gadgets]

I'm running Catalina with DL 4.3 "GA" drivers and I continue to have issues, including very high CPU (eg DL drivers consuming 100% of one of my CPUs on a pretty constant basis), and as I just discovered, DL drivers are also causing all of my Java apps to crash.

As a result I have removed the DL adapters from my system and am using a Rube Goldberg mix of usb-c display adapters. My system is happily running at 8% CPU and my Java apps are working as well.

As far as my $200 Targus boat anchor? I hope to be able to use it (and the embedded DisplayLink hardware) again someday soon.

[max_can]

This is now consistently an issue on my Macbook Air 2018 w/ 16GB RAM! Fan constantly running and performance significantly impacted. Is there a fix?