Hi,

I have had this problem for sometime now, all of a sudden , a lot of disk activity starts to take place (almost as if I were searching for a particular file, which I am not ) and this in turn causes the CPU to run @100% . This go's on for sometime , ultimately to the point where the fan on my laptop starts running on full blast to cool the cpu down as it is still runnning at 100% and my hard disk is going nuts. The only way to calm things down is to reboot , where afterwards everything just seems to idle like normal.

I am usinf EXT3 for the file system , I was wondering if it is doing some sort of journalising or indexing, and then just gets hung up in the process?

Anyone see anyting like this before?

Hardware:
dell inspiron 4150 laptop
40 GB toshiba HD
512MB DDR

Software:
Fedora Core 1
Running kernel-2.4.22-1.2149.nptl

What process is eating the CPU? Type 'top' in a terminal window to see what's taking up your resources. It might be something you don't need and can shut down, or tell it to run with a lower priority.

I am sorry I forgot to mention , that I always have system montior running. As soon as I see the signs of the cpu reaching 100% I check the process tab to see whats eating it up, and nothing!!! there is nothing listed there . When I say nothing, I mean there is no process listed taking up 100% of the cpu, everything seems normal .Thats whats so confusing. No process that is showing up to be consuming the cpu, hard drive activity thats borderinng insane, and a cpu @ 100% with a fan on at full speed. Only thing to do is reboot, then it calms down as if nothing ever happened.

Er, no process at all? Does 'top' work, instead of the system monitor? If it shows something using CPU, it at least has to have a name or a process ID or something. If top doesn't do it, try 'ps', which can also show CPU usage, like this:

ps -eo "%C %c"

That'll show all process names and their CPU usage at the time of running ps.

Sounds like it might be a cron job running. Does it occur at a regular time, top of the hour,
+30? Fedora will run prelink once a day, and it can take some time to do it..

Hi thanks for the replies,

I also think it might be some scheduled job, or system task running. I am not familiar with "prelink", what is that service?

thanks.

From the prelink man page:

DESCRIPTION
prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynam-
ically linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for
their relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to
fewer relocations the run-time memory consumption decreases too (espe-
cially number of unshareable pages). Such prelinking information is
only used if all its dependant libraries have not changed since pre-
linking, otherwise programs are relocated normally.