On Tuesday 12 February 2008, James wrote: > Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > One of the workstations (amd64 2gig ram) has a load that never > > > drops below 1.0, as seen by top. Looking at a ps nothing stands > > > out. I did notice that 'X' is at the top of the list, even when > > > the machine is quiescent (nobody doing anything). Suspiciaous. > > > Clearly I have a run away or hidden process using resources. > > > Although all my system run kde 3.5.8 only one shows this problem. > > > > vmstat is your friend here. It's all in the man page, so use it and > > narrow down the process that's blocking. Maybe you have a threading > > race condition or similar. > > # vmstat > procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- > ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo > in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 847368 224736 403404 0 0 26 > 12 172 251 1 0 98 1
According to this, that machine is sitting there doing nothing. So I see two maybe three possibilities: uptime and top are talking shit (happens way more often than one might assume) your machine is indeed hacked and trojaned, but the script kiddie forgot to upload a modified top and uptime (highly unlikely - someone who knows to replace vmstat will certainly replace top and uptime) your kernel scheduler has a bizarre view of life. This is most likely, I'd say you have a collection of settings that cause the kernel to collect it's utilization stats at precisely the moment when it really does do something useful. I saw someone rag poor Ingo two months back on lkml with a similar thing. Turns out the user was right. What are your relevant settings of things like: cpu scheduler (not i/o scheduler) timer freq tickless kernel? -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
