100% CPU usage

[awam66]

Hi,
Yesterday I had a number of updates the most significant being to Kernel 2.6.28-13 and since then the cpu usage is constantly at 100%. Looking in System monitor there is nothing doing anything like that. Any ideas or has anyone else seen this. On my external USB disc I have xubuntu with the same kernel and no problems there.

Forgot to say it OS Jaunty Jackalope amd64 processor 1G memory

[emeraldgirl08]

I had to disable three things in start-up for this problem:

a)check for new hardware drivers,
b)remote desktop, and
c)update notifier.

I figure I could do these manually anyway. I figured it had to do with something wireless after I turned off wireless and the spike went down. I did have the same symptoms such as a consistent 90+ CPU meter reading that would not go away! I also did not find anything in System Monitor that would cause this spike. Now I am staying at a fairly consistent sub 20% CPU reading

Hope it stays this way!

[Therion]

Had a very similar experience with one of my dual-cores being pegged at 100% -- 100% of the time. I decided to let it go, but when I came back from class a couple hours later, same story.

When I looked I found it was a Firefox process that was running up the bill, even though there were no instances of Firefox open. I killed the process and that solved the problem. Odd though.

Running Karmic 64-bit.

[emeraldgirl08]

Therion: What process was that? I had instances where my Firefox locked up the screen and I had to reboot. Hmmm.

[awam66]

Still a puzzle,
I tried booting to the older kernel 2.6.28-11 but he problem remains. So looks like something other than the kernel.
Still investigating.

[ssri]

try running the terminal with the command "top" to see which processes are eating up your cpu. Then you can type sudo kill -9 <process#> or sudo killall -9 <COMMAND>

[awam66]

I had to disable three things in start-up for this problem:

a)check for new hardware drivers,
b)remote desktop, and
c)update notifier.

I figure I could do these manually anyway. I figured it had to do with something wireless after I turned off wireless and the spike went down. I did have the same symptoms such as a consistent 90+ CPU meter reading that would not go away! I also did not find anything in System Monitor that would cause this spike. Now I am staying at a fairly consistent sub 20% CPU reading

Hope it stays this way!

Hi emeraldgirl,
Just unchecked a) and b) above and that solved the problem.
Now which one is it?

[Therion]

Therion: What process was that? I had instances where my Firefox locked up the screen and I had to reboot. Hmmm.

It said something obvious, like "Firefox". Just look for the process eating 99% of your CPU and force-quit it. Or you can opt to *Kill it With Fire, like I did.








/*Killing with fire not recommended.