LinuxQuestions.org - Annoying System Load (100%)

- Slackware (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/)

- - Annoying System Load (100%) (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/annoying-system-load-100-a-350847/)

Annoying System Load (100%)

Every time I load an app the CPU get to 100% use and everything else slow down. Sometimes (in either fluxbox and xfce) when I left-click for the menu it goes to 100%. I open aterm and I get 85-90%. The cpu load goes a 100% even when I click a link on a web page (using firefox) and stick to it until the web page is loaded.
Where I find this really annoying is when I'm working and I have 3 or 4 OpenOffice document open, firefox. A document in the background auto-save and I can't work on the foreground document or look at another web page or even scroll a page because the cpu is busy at 100%.
Things aren't smooth!

I would like to know if there is something I can do to better distribute the cpu load between apps and reduce process priority for apps in the background.
Maybe it's a simple case of "did you enable [insert kernel option] in your kernel".

By curiousity, could you post your machine specs and kernel version ?

PIII 450
250 RAM
kernel 2.6.12

Maybe consider run lighter applications, did you try abiword instead of open office ?

It's not about OpenOffice, it's always. I run only firefox and click on a link and the cpu load jumps to 100%. Or I start X window and left-click to open the menu and I get 100%.
Here I only have aterm and firefox open and I will click on 'submit reply' and the cpu load will be 100%.

Hi.

I am not sure what could be causing a problem, but I often try to find out what is not causing the problem to solve it.

For example a lot of memory swapping could take up a lot of cpu time.

Run memtest86+ to see if your memory is OK.

Do you have, are you using a swap file?

What is the output of free -m ?

Or you might just be running a ton of servers that you don't need.

What is the output of ps -a and top?

Hope this helps

Samac

hdparm /dev/hda

Assuming that hda is the hard-drive that your OS is
running off...

Cheers,
Tink

here goes some output:

top -ax

Code:

  PID TTY      STAT  TIME COMMAND

    1 ?        S      0:01 init [3]      

    2 ?        SN    0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]

    3 ?        S<    0:00 [events/0]

    4 ?        S<    0:00 [khelper]

    5 ?        S<    0:00 [kthread]

    6 ?        S<    0:00 [kacpid]

    7 ?        S<    0:04 [kblockd/0]

  10 ?        S      0:27 [kswapd0]

  11 ?        S<    0:00 [aio/0]

  12 ?        S      0:00 [kseriod]

  15 ?        S<    0:01 [reiserfs/0]

  62 ?        S      0:00 [kjournald]

  83 ?        Ss    0:00 /usr/sbin/syslogd

  86 ?        Ss    0:00 /usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x

  104 ?        Ss    0:00 /sbin/dhcpcd -d -t 10 eth0

  274 ?        Ss    0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd

  288 ?        Ss    0:04 /usr/sbin/cupsd

  525 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/crond -l10

  535 tty1    Ss    0:00 -bash

  536 tty2    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux

  537 tty3    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux

  538 tty4    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux

  539 tty5    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux

  540 tty6    Ss+    0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux

 5555 ?        S      0:33 [pdflush]

 5645 ?        S      0:23 [pdflush]

13108 tty1    S+    0:00 /bin/sh /usr/X11R6/bin/startx

13120 tty1    S+    0:00 xinit /home/mixtr/.xinitrc --

13121 ?        SL    32:29 X :0

13129 tty1    S      0:04 xfce4-session

13132 ?        Ss    1:00 xfce-mcs-manager

13135 tty1    S      0:25 xfwm4

13137 tty1    S      0:17 xftaskbar4

13139 tty1    S      0:17 xfdesktop

13141 tty1    S    42:33 xfce4-panel

13143 tty1    S      0:07 xfcalendar

14256 tty1    S      0:10 gaim

14988 tty1    S      0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/firefox

15025 tty1    S      0:00 /bin/sh /usr/local/firefox/run-mozilla.sh /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin

15035 tty1    S      0:53 /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin

15042 tty1    S      0:00 /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin

15043 tty1    S      0:00 /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin

15048 tty1    S      0:00 /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin

15059 tty1    S      0:00 aterm

15060 pts/0    Ss    0:00 -bash

15070 pts/0    S      0:00 bash

free -m

Code:

            total      used      free    shared    buffers    cached

Mem:          250        200        49          0        20        91

-/+ buffers/cache:        88        162

Swap:          588        26        561

hdparm /dev/hda

Code:

/dev/hda:

 multcount    =  0 (off)

 IO_support  =  0 (default 16-bit)

 unmaskirq    =  0 (off)

 using_dma    =  1 (on)

 keepsettings =  0 (off)

 readonly    =  0 (off)

 readahead    = 256 (on)

 geometry    = 19885/16/63, sectors = 10262568960, start = 0

Hmmm ... dma looks alright... what was the uptime of the
box at the time you took the top? It seems to spend an
awful lot of CPU time on X anf xfce4-panel. Also, what
driver for X are you using?

uptime is 8 days and 5 hours
using Xorg 6.8.2 w/ NVIDIA driver 7167
xfce 4.2.2

Reboot? There may be memory and processer(?) leaks that will be cleared when you reboot..

It's like that from a long time. And it does that on my girlfriend's computer too. so it doen't seem to be cpu/memory related.

Quote:

Originally posted by tuxdev
Reboot? There may be memory and processer(?) leaks that will be cleared when you reboot..

Look at frees output above. I wouldn't have thought
that there's anything leaking. No call for the windows
solution.

Quote:

Originally posted by mixtr
And it does that on my girlfriend's computer too. so it doen't seem to be cpu/memory related.

What was the behaviour like with a 2.4 kernel or the
2.6 that came with 10.1?

Cheers,
Tink