Hello,

I wonder why my processor is so busy on my dell i5150 laptop, 3Ghz with 512 Mo of RAM, with gnome gui.
I often open an xterm, nautilus, and system mo,itor

I have noticed
~15< gnome-system-monitor < 60
~15< X < ~30
in anacron:
~10 updatadb
and other processus in anacron between 10 and 40%

How can I reduce that ? What goes wrong ?

Cheers, xround

have you ran the :
command to see if there was anything unusual causing this ?

Using top, I noticed X process uses at least 20% of cpu.
And there are sometimes updated and kjournald, which are pretty high.
Now cpu uses is more ok, but it still uses between 20 and 40% while I am doing nothing!

Xround

How often is anacron running updatedb?

Today it is better, but yesterday there were series of peaks every ~10 minutes.
Today I don't find updatedb anymore, a "ps -e | grep update" gives me only a process named "kupdated".
Anyway, I still have some delays when I edit a file for instance with less, in a gnome xterm, while doing nothing special.

Now I've justed started a kernel build, which is long and cpu consuming.
Using top, I have the delay set to default, and I can view cc1 that consumes somtimes 90%, or 50%, or 20%. If I sum the processi when it is for about 20%, the sum doesn't exceed 50%, while idle displays nearly 100%. Is it normal ?

xround.

I have detected, three very heavy processes, that ran for say 5 minutes:
uniq, sed, and sort.

What these process combined rely to ? updatedb, that ran also during this time ?

xround.

You can find the process that forks that processes by the command pstree:

There is a -p switch also, which causes pstree to display pids. Also look at the /etc/crontab file for updatedb entries and decrease the update frequency.