I woke up this morning and linux came out of its sleepy thingy and then i noticed that the CPU was on 100% ALL the time. So i took a look in the processes list and gnome was at around 30-60% all the time and using around 200MB of my ram!! so was another program but can't remember what it was called and also control center was using around 10-20% CPU time, whilst using around 70MB. I couldn't understand this because it's as if they were working whilst I was asleep......on what? Also, i looked at the more info bit and it said that these prgrams were 'sleeping'....were they sleep processing or something b/c i thought they would just be cached and on 0% time? I did take a screenshot but it was tooo dog slow that I just rebooted.

What's it doing?
Cheers

Probably executing 'updatedb', it's a cron job...

What's that mean?

Well there's a daemon(service) named 'cron' (or vcron or crond...) which executes tasks on a schedule(everyday or everymonth or at 6am of 24/12/03).
Well, 'slocate' is one of it's entries by default, and it executes 'updatedb' which updates your 'locate' database.
And this takes up alot of ressources(executing 'updatedb' I mean).

ahh, i understand, i woke up at around 11ish (lazy b*stard, i know... but i've just broken up from school )Could it have been doing this foru around 5 hours? Also, what is the locate database?
Thanks

The locate database contains the list of all files on the system, it's used by 'locate' to find files:

I'm sorry to keep asking questions but why would you want to update the database containing all the files on the system? So it has some sort of backup, make it faster?

No, it isn't a backup because it doesn't contain the data of the files, it's a list(sort of) of the files(name with location, ex: /bin/bash), not the files themselves:
searching the list is faster than searching through the entire system.

oooooh, so it's kinda similar to xp where you can enable that indexed search thingy majig? I understand now, cheers