On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:42:30, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:28:20 -0700 (MST) > Carlos Konstanski <[email protected]> dijo: > > >On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, John Jason Jordan wrote: > > > >> Something is eating 100% of one of my CPUs on my Fedora 11 x86_64 > >> Thinkpad. Occasionally it drops down, at which point the other CPU > >> surges to 100%. (I think they switch back and forth, probably so > >> one of them doesn't get too tired and go on strike.) > >> > >> System Monitor shows nothing taking more than a couple percent of > >> either CPU. From the command line top also shows nothing. > >> > >> Are there other tools to sleuth this down? Commands I could use? > > >I've seen this kind of thing before. Where have I seen it? On an > >Oracle database server that was attached to a NAS via NFS. The NFS > >traffic was voluminous, and it used up some serious CPU. But it > >didn't show up as a userland process because it was all happening in > >the kernel. Top does not show you an individual process for kernel > >work unless there's some userland connector process which is doing > >the heavy lifting. > > > >So think about what you might be doing with your computer that is > >exclusively working the kernel. > > This is making sense. At least it explains why something can be eating > 100% of one of my CPUs, yet nothing shows up in top or System Monitor. > > Unfortunately, I know little of the kernel or how it works or what it > does. I do know how to use kernels to make popcorn, but that is about > it. > > Currently open apps include Vuze (Azureus), Claws Mail, and Firefox. > Of these I suspect Vuze the most. Does a bittorrent client use > processes that are exclusively working with the kernel? > The last time I tried Vuze, I wound up terminating it with extreme prejudice. It soaked up CPU, and was generally a pain to use. I seldom use BitTorrent anyway, so deleting it was no loss. The current (Fedora 12) default BitTorrent GNOME client works well enough for my purposes. (Downloading new Linux distros, and that's it.) You might want to look into using GKrellM as a system monitor. It can monitor all your CPUs separately, along with system temperatures, fan speeds, voltages (assuming that your motherboard reports such things), disk and network usage, and so on. It's a fairly lightweight program, too, generally staying below 7% CPU on my T40 ThinkPad. It's also skinnable, so that you can change its appearance. The annoying thing about that is that the RPM package of the skins is (was?) only available in the Fedora 9 repository. :-P So I keep a copy backed up and never erase it. :-) --Dale -- "Never try to out-stubborn a cat." _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
