High CPU usage / high number of interrupts

From: 0x1eef <0x1eef_at_protonmail.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2022 23:01:20 UTC
Hi, everyone!

When I use Chromium, I see a high rate of CPU usage across all four cores. The rate can be anywhere from 20% to 50%, even above that. I am not doing anything intensive, just browsing twitter, reddit, YouTube or GitHub. It has been like this since I installed FreeBSD, but since it's not a blocker I have been lazy about looking into it.

I don't know why it happens. I can see that there are a high number of interrupts on 'xhci0', and that seems to carry over to each CPU core as well:

# vmstat -i
interrupt total rate
irq1: atkbd0 50 0
irq9: acpi0 403 0
cpu0:timer 30716618 98
cpu1:timer 25457926 81
cpu2:timer 34344531 109
cpu3:timer 25542867 81
irq128: xhci0 328107434 1044
irq130: nvme0:admin 15 0
irq131: nvme0:io0 701041 2
irq132: nvme0:io1 692045 2
irq133: nvme0:io2 792760 3
irq134: nvme0:io3 693091 2
irq135: hdac0 1718425 5
irq136: vgapci0 6273295 20
Total 455040501 1448

# dmesg | grep xhci0
xhci0: <Intel Ice Lake-LP USB 3.1 controller> mem 0x95110000-0x9511ffff at device 20.0 on pci0
xhci0: 32 bytes context size, 64-bit DMAusbus0 on xhci0

It might also be helpful to know that I tried OpenBSD on the same computer but it was unusable for a similar reason: 95%+ interrupts on CPU. The impact that had made all tasks extremely slow. On FreeBSD it is not as bad, but I still think think it is not normal.

Can anyone suggest what might be wrong, tips to debug, etc ? If more information is needed, please let me know. Thanks for your time.

Best,0x1eef