cpu usage

My RPi's cpu is constantly maxed out. The python games that come with it use more than 90% of the cpu, but only uses ~44mb of the 512mb. Is that normal?

Thanks for all of your support.

[abishur]

Many questions come to mind, namely are you trying to run these programs from within X or from the bash prompt? Which Disto are you using? what's your current memory split?

I'm not using bash. Not sure about X. Raspbian. 384 and 128.

[abishur]

X is the thing you enter when you type "startx" (The desktop environment), bash is just the command prompt

Well I am using the GUI x.

There's no hardware acceleration for your X display therefore any moving images would cause the CPU usage to rise.

Richard S.

Would another OS be faster?

You could try Xming it's an X-Windows client for Windows I use it to access my PI desktop on my desktop since I don't have HDMI. - viewtopic.php?f=26&t=18420
In theory it should help to off-load some of the processing power to Windows which would be handling the images and not the PI.

Richard S.

It doesn't take much to max out the CPU, truth of the matter is the Pi has a puny CPU. It has an impressive GPU, which is what invariably gets demoed when they are showing it off, but most stuff doesn't use the GPU.

Running a remote X server like redhawk says helps, since it takes a lot of the weight off the Pi.