Re: high system cpu usage, no culprit in top

[Brent Miller <unraveled@sbcglobal.net>]

Justin Guerin wrote:

>My CPU is 100% utilized, but no processes seem to be using the CPU.  I can't 
>seem to figure out what's causing the load.  I know that something is, 
>though, because xscreensaver is running very slow.
>
Some daemons (mysql comes to mind) won't show up under top, but of
course continue to use resources. I _think_ this is because of the way
they do threading---If you do a top or ps -A you'll only get the parent
processes and not the children (who are actually using the cpu.)

I remember that there is a command that shows you what processes are
running that are not showing up under ps, but I cannot think of it at
the moment. You can always compare the PID's from ps -A against
/proc/[0-9]* to find the culprit though.

HTH,
Brent