There seems to suddently be an enormous amount of CPU usage compared to before.

hda /mnt/windows 81%
hda5 /ext3 100%
Mandrake 9.2 (Torrent)

At this point, CPU usage is 100% (I've been told this is in fact normal in Linux).

Does this point to anything, say a runaway process that is consuming
tons of CPU?

I've tried to diagnose this with "du", "df" etc. however can't
seem to pinpoint this?

Any suggestion appreciated on how to attack this problem.



Jerald Weinstein M.S.

Hi Jerald,

I think you're getting confused between CPU, memory and disk usage.

Memory is normally 100% allocated (or near enough) and that's not a problem. CPU should not be 100%. You've posted information about disk utilisation (how much data are on your hard disks), but it's not clear what that's telling us.

If you run the following commands and post the output, I can give you some pointers on where to look.

vmstat 2 4
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 0 4344 4104 139572 0 0 69 2 165 73 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 4344 4104 139572 0 0 0 0 162 52 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 4344 4104 139572 0 0 0 0 163 50 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 4344 4104 139572 0 0 0 0 164 53 0 0 100 0

df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5
4.9G 4.7G 0 100% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
14G 11G 2.6G 81% /mnt/windows

You do not have a CPU or memory problem. Your problem is that your root (/) partition is 100% full - no space for more files at all. You need to delete some files from that root partition.

It looks like you have everything under root (e.g. your home directory etc.) so looking there to delete some files (any big ISOs?) is a good place to start. Alternatively, move files to /mnt/windows to free up space without losing anything.

If you really need more space, look at buying another hard disk (or a few thousand floppies ;-) )

Okay, sounds good. However, what about trying to detect a runaway
process?

There didn't seem to be a precursor to this sudden jump in memory use.

As I said, your problem looks like disk use, not memory use. You may not have a runaway process.

The first thing is to clear some space on your disk. If you notice, having done that, that the space is filling up quickly again then you will need to find out what it causing it to fill up. First you need to clear some space, though.

I have never had this happen so not from personnal experience here. When the drive fills up, it keeps banging its head against the wall trying to figure out what to do with the data and what is more important to save and what can be dumped to /dev/null land.

If you correct the drive space problem, the rest will likely be fine. I would delete some of the source files that you don't need anymore, like rpms and such.

Good Luck!!!

Thanks for the help, I discovered the source of the problem and
it is now resolved.

In circumstances like this one, on more than one occasion,
I have gone to the **/var/log** directory and more often than
not one of these files is way too big. The reason this time was the
file **/var/log/info** was way too big.
I simply deleted it and that solved the problem of too little memory.

A good idea in the future would be instead to make a separate partition for the /var/log directory.

It was up to 2 GIGS in size. The reason for this was I had recently
successfully installed a wireless card driver (took me three weeks)
and if the card isn't in the slot on boot, something keeps looking for it
after booting into KDE and just keeps recording that it isn't there and
logs in that it isn't there( /var/log/info) over and over and over. This file had lots and lots of entries for this which was consuming all that space.

If I inserted the card and left it there, everything is OK.
I next neeed to find out how to correct this so I don't have to leave the
wireless card in the slot all the time.

Joy joy joy.

Thanks again and I hope this little success story has enlightened at least
a few of those patient enough to read the whole blog.

Cheers.

We are just glad you got it fixed. A command you may want to remember.

List all files and the SIZE. Just have to scroll through or pipe through to less. Brain fart. I have those sometimes.

Later

I'm glad I cleared it up too.

Other tools for this include....

top
du
df
vmstat