Kali 2018.4 stuttering and lagging - high CPU usage

[kali linux]

I recently got a machine (ThinkPad P50):


Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1535M
64GB RAM
512GB SSD
Quadro M2000M GPU


Installed default kali 2018.4, with lvm encryption, and it was slow as **** in a fresh install. Had a big hassle to install nvidia drivers while struggling with nouveau and inbuilt repo drivers, that got stuck as nvidia-installer-cleanup is a buggy mess (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=798732).
Somehow was able to install the 410.78 drivers from nvidia, and performance drastically improved from both nouveau (which was slow as ****), and inbuilit repo drivers (390.87), but still, CPU usage is pretty high even when doing a simple task like scrolling a webpage. Default firefox-ESR takes up a lot of CPU, as I can hear the fan spinning up everytime I try scrolling a web page in there.

I still think the stuttering somehow has to do with graphics driver vs gnome, but at this time, can't figure out exactly what's causing this slowness in gnome environment.
Attaching the output from:
nvidia-smi:



+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 410.78 Driver Version: 410.78 CUDA Version: 10.0 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+================= =====+======================|
| 0 Quadro M2000M Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| N/A 52C P0 N/A / N/A | 1454MiB / 4043MiB | 19% Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|================================================= ============================|
| 0 737 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 177MiB |
| 0 779 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 64MiB |
| 0 1098 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 714MiB |
| 0 1188 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 457MiB |
| 0 6630 G /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr 1MiB |
| 0 6666 G /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr 1MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+


lscpu:


Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
Address sizes: 39 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
CPU(s): 8
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-7
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 94
Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1535M v5 @ 2.90GHz
Stepping: 3
CPU MHz: 900.017
CPU max MHz: 3800.0000
CPU min MHz: 800.0000
BogoMIPS: 5808.00
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 256K
L3 cache: 8192K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-7
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc art arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch cpuid_fault epb invpcid_single pti ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm mpx rdseed adx smap clflushopt intel_pt xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves dtherm ida arat pln pts hwp hwp_notify hwp_act_window hwp_epp flush_l1d


Any ideas on how to improve the performance?

[kali linux]

Update:
I researched and found maybe the processor might not be compatible with intel_pstate and disabled that by editing grub. Performance is miles better now, but tasks like playing 1080p youtube videos on FF-ESR full screen, still lags a lot. The system is alot smoother though.
Any ideas what else could be the issue?

[corsario28]

I had the same problem, tried on VMWare, an old laptop (previously running Kali) and a high end desktop (32GB RAM, 8 cores, etc) all of them work slow, and unfortunately I cant find the old Kali version to reinstall

[corsario28]

Update:
I researched and found maybe the processor might not be compatible with intel_pstate and disabled that by editing grub. Performance is miles better now, but tasks like playing 1080p youtube videos on FF-ESR full screen, still lags a lot. The system is alot smoother though.
Any ideas what else could be the issue?


Ive found that the releases Kali Linux 64 Bit affected me, Kali Linux Xfce 64 Bit works like a charm