100% CPU and HD Usage For at least 3 Hours at a Time My PC has an ASUS P5PE-VM motherboard with 495.3MiB RAM and Intel Celeron D 3.33MHz. Kernel Linux 2.6.24-19-generic. Available disk space 140.3GiB.
I installed Hardy Heron (for the second time) on 01 July 2008. I installed it from the LiveCD image in a clean partition on my hard drive. I have downloaded and installed all updates and confirmed the update lists regularly. My partitions are: /dev/sda1 ext3 root partition 20.00 GiB Hardy: clean at install time /dev/sda3 swap 2.00 GiB /dev/sda4 ext3 unmounted 20.00 GiB for next Ubuntu LTS /dev/sda2 ext3 /home 190.88 GiB contains my on-going /home I set Swapon in Gparted, but every time I re-boot, I find that swap has been reset to "off". How do I make it stay on? THE PROBLEM Every few days, I suddenly lose all control of my machine. The mouse only responds about once every few seconds. All open application windows grey-out. The disk starts hammering away. If I can manage to get the mouse cursor to the upper tool bar to click on System, It takes 15 to 20 minutes for the System menu to open. Effectively, I have no control of my computer. The problem can occur with or without applications running. It appears to be independent of open applications. It can occur with no applications running. I mentioned this problem on Launchpad 16 July 2008 (bug 249123). At the time, through a series of coincidences, I wrongly deduced that amule was the culprit. I therefore decided to give Hardy a few weeks of soak testing before making any further proclamation about the problem. I have taken to opening the System Monitor every time I start a session to try to catch the process that is occupying the CPU. However, the rogue process offers so little time to other processes that the System Monitor cannot never update its display. Apart from the monitor itself occupying 3 to 4% of CPU time, all other processes are shown as sleeping (0% CPU). This is not the true state of the system since the monitor's display is frozen. I have left the rogue process running for as much as 3 hours at a time, but obviously, I do have work to do and so I have no option but to pull the power cord and re-boot. After a re-boot, I notice that there is always at least one orphaned inode. After a re-boot, I get a few hours of use of my computer before the rogue process starts again. I have never allowed the rogue process to go on for more than 3 hours because I suspect that the process may be looping and would thus go on forever. I suspected that it might be an indexer of some kind that was not running "nice". I removed Tracker from my installation completely. Tracker was not the culprit. Later, I suspected amule. I thought it may be creating hashes of all the files on my hard drive. I disables amule. Amule was not the culprit either. The best guess I can come up with is that it may be something being run by anacron. The process tries several times to re-run after I pull the power cord and re-boot. It then leaves me in peace for a few days. A few days later, it starts all over again. It does not seem to correspond to any of the anacron time periods. However, this may be because, having failed to complete on one occasion, it tries the same run again several times. The only remaining thought I can come up with is the size of my hard drive, which is 250 GB with a home partition of 190.88GiB. Could one of the indexers run by anacron be finding difficulty here. Also, since swap gets switched off for some reason every time I re-boot, my system is usually running without swap. Could this be a factor? Why does the kernel scheduler permit a process to occupy the CPU so solidly? I really have no idea what the rogue process is or what it does. Nevertheless, it does, for all practical purposes render Hardy Heron, at least for the time being, unusable as an operating system for serious work. Please could you shed any light on this issue. Sincerely, Rob Morton -- Ubuntu 8.04 : after installing april 8/2008 updates, hard drive led never stops flashing and CPU consuption is VERY high https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/214763 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
