A bug has been discovered and confirmed that can peg CPU utilization to 100% if all of the following are true:
(1) You are running OpenVPN 1.4.0, (2) you are running on Linux 2.4 or higher, (3) you are using the --verb 0 option to suppress all output, and (4) a non-fatal socket error occurs (such as a temporary network outage). There is a simple workaround available in this patch against 1.4.0: http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/patch/esec-disable.patch Patch Usage (from openvpn-1.4.0 directory after fresh tarball extract): patch < esec-disable.patch && ./configure && make Alternatively, you can get the fix in the current development tarball: http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/beta/openvpn-1.4.0.2.tar.gz Or the simplest solution is to just use --verb 1 (the default) until 1.4.1 is released. If --verb 1 is too verbose for you, check out --mute which can be used to lessen the incidence of repetitive messages. --mute is unaffected by this bug. James
