High CPU usage, wireplumber?

Hardware Support
,
1

Hi there.

I've crawled through the forums and haven't really found a solution to my weird issue so was hoping for a bit of support please.

I've migrated away from PopOS (since the Cosmic update) by moving my home dir to a separate partition, then installed Zorin with the home partition mapped to /home.

On Zorin, i'm noticing high CPU usage while idle, and top is showing wireplumber as the potential culprit. There haven't been many suggestions on this forum about wireplumbed that have worked in my case, but I have observed that if I wiggle the microphone input volume up and down then put it back, the CPU usage settles down. To be clear, I didn't perform any audio driver customisations or anything like that on my previous install, so I'm hoping that this isn't coming from a stray config in my /home partition, i just wanted to keep my configs and app data.

Unfortunately, this reduced CPU usage from wiggling the mic volume slider doesn't persist after a restart. Do anyone have any advice on how I can mitigate this going forward?

Thanks :slight_smile:

OS: Zorin OS 18 x86_64
Host: Blade 15 Base Model (Early 2021) - RZ09-0369 (6.04)
Kernel: Linux 6.17.0-19-generic
Uptime: 24 mins
Packages: 2107 (dpkg), 22 (flatpak-system), 72 (flatpak-user), 45 (brew)
Shell: zsh 5.9
Display (BOE0804): 1920x1080 in 16", 144 Hz [Built-in]
DE: GNOME 46.0
WM: Mutter (X11)
WM Theme: ZorinPurple-Dark
Theme: ZorinPurple-Dark [GTK2/3/4]
Icons: ZorinPurple-Dark [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Ubuntu Sans (11pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: Adwaita (24px)
Terminal: GNOME Terminal 3.52.0
Terminal Font: MesloLGLDZ Nerd Font Mono (11pt)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H (12) @ 5.00 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile / Max-Q [Discrete]
GPU 2: Intel UHD Graphics @ 1.15 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 5.61 GiB / 15.48 GiB (36%)
Swap: 0 B / 7.63 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 16.41 GiB / 97.37 GiB (17%) - ext4
Disk (/home): 381.62 GiB / 788.46 GiB (48%) - ext4
Disk (/media/aetharr/LinuxData): 775.84 GiB / 937.24 GiB (83%) - ext4
Local IP (wlo1): 10.0.1.108/24
Battery (Blade): 100% [AC Connected]
Locale: en_GB.UTF-8

Screenshot from 2026-03-24 16-34-56-labelled
Screenshot from 2026-03-24 16-34-56-labelled1920×1001 192 KB

2

This is a strong indicator.
Have you tried resetting the contents of your home config directory? (Maybe .local for wireplumber)
Any of

~/.config/wireplumber
~/.local/state/wireplumber
~/.config/pipewire

if they exist, may be creating conflicting configurations, as they were setup for Pop_OS.
If you want to safely simplify it:

mv ~/.config/wireplumber ~/.config/wireplumber.bak

mv ~/.local/state/wireplumber ~/.local/state/wireplumber.bak

mv ~/.config/pipewire ~/.config/pipewire.bak

1 Like
3

Hi

Thanks for the tip. Honestly, while I know bits and bobs about Linux, I'm always learning new things about it. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be a config item, because it isn't something i've knowingly interfered with.

That said, something must have at some point as I checked the config items, confirmed there was nothing of specific importance and removed as you suggested and voila! Problem solved!

Thank you so much! And thank you for being civil about my issue. I appreciate there are community guidelines, but considering what other Linux-centric forums are like, I was hesitant to even reach out. Really, really appreciate it! :+1: I can't wait to give this distro a good run!

1 Like