Stackpole, Chris wrote: > I once saw a similar problem. I don't know if this is your case, but I > will explain what I did. > > I checked everything from the hard drive with iostat to the memory, my > cpu was being hammered much like yours but nothing seemed to fess up to > doing it. I installed htop (http://htop.sourceforge.net/ also in the > repos for apt-get goodness) and then I had it display Kernel threads > (run htop at the command line and sort by cpu with F6 then Shift+K to > show Kernel threads). In my case it was kacpid that was chewing up my > cpu. So I edited grub to be acpi=off and it went away. > > That was sometime ago, but a quick Google search shows that it still > happens to people on Debian and Ubuntu systems. I have no idea what > causes it. FWIW, I ran into this problem on my laptop recently. Eventually, I realized that it was so humid out that the lid close sensor was malfunctioning, generating a constant stream of acpi lid open events. (Apparently no lid close events, luckily.) Each of these caused kacpid to do some work, as well as pass an event on to acpid, which ran a lid open program (which didn't really do anything). I eventually killed acpid, which controlled the load somewhat. And waited for things to dry out to the point the acpi events stopped happening. Moral of the story: It could be any crazy kind of hardware problem you can imagine.. Note that top is not very good at showing the load caused by lots of very shorted lived processes being started, so it's easy to miss this kind of problem in it. I straced acpid to figure out what was going on. -- see shy jo
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