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Re: high system cpu usage, no culprit in top



On April 7, 2004 09:44 am, Ken Gilmour wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 17:36, Leo Spalteholz wrote:
> > But what's accounting for the 32.1%?  I have about 30% usage all the
> > time too and the top couple entries add up to less than 5 percent
> > followed by a bunch of processes with a cpu usage of 0%.  So what's
> > using 25% of my cpu when I'm not doing anything?
>
> It looks like top on your machine is sorting by Memory Usage and not CPU
> usage so use "top -i" to run it in interactive mode then type "o" while
> it is running to change the order in which it displays usage. It will
> give you a prompt "Order to sort:" simply type "cpu" and this should
> sort it properly for you

It's sorting by cpu usage, and look at my output:
top - 14:03:06 up 17:15,  1 user,  load average: 3.12, 3.16, 3.35
Tasks:  98 total,   1 running,  95 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
Cpu(s): 34.9% us, 65.1% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% 
si
Mem:    256876k total,   253764k used,     3112k free,    33732k buffers
Swap:   979924k total,    71668k used,   908256k free,    61896k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  nFLT COMMAND
 1832 leo       15   0 45332  23m 8004 S  3.3  9.2   3:03.53  401 wish
 1618 root      15   0  102m  15m  83m S  2.0  6.0  14:01.47  315 XFree86
 3936 leo       15   0 28544  12m  26m S  0.3  4.9   0:01.20   11 kdeinit
 3941 leo       17   0  2088 1052 1876 R  0.3  0.4   0:00.44    0 top
    1 root      16   0  1520  412 1368 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.59   22 init

So it's using 34.9% from the user and 65% from the system.  I understand 
top not accounting for the 65% but why does it say 34% if my cpu load is 
really around 7%?  (adding up the non-zero entries of cpu usage)
Is there any other way to find out what's using the cpu?  
My system started doing this when I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel.  Usually 
when  I boot its fine, then after a while cpu usage goes to 100% and stays 
there.. Once in a while it will go to normal again (sometimes after a few 
days of uptime) then back to 100% usage.
It's really annoying.. Could this be a misbehaving driver?  How would I 
find out?

Thanks,
Leo

>
> Ken



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