asked on

Unknown process takes over

My system is taken over by a process a couple times a day for 3 minutes or so. When its happening, I look at the system monitor and i see some cpu usage with enormous amounts of memory usage.

I checked for viruses, nothing. I really can't do much while its happening, so i just sit it out. Its really annoying.

Is there anyway to tell what is happening, and possibly prevent it, or at least schedule it?

I'm using RedHat 9.0 and KDE.

Karl Heinz Kremer

Run a terminal window with top that you display on your screen. When this happens again, you should be able to see which process is the one hogging your CPU - that is, if the X display is still getting updated during this slowdown. One other thing you can try is log in remotely and then check the top output. Chances are that even though your system seems to come to a stop, it's mainly the GUI that gets locked out. A remote network connection may still work.
Upgrade to a 2.6.x kernel - they have an improved scheduler, and your X session should not get that unresponsive anymore.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Alf666

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owensleftfoot

At a guess I would think XFS - the xwindows font server to be the problem. The only other thing I can think of which causes behaviour like this is the anacron job which updates the locate database and logrotate.

omom

ASKER

So the process "X" is the culprit i guess, what does this mean?

08:00:45 up 1:09, 3 users, load average: 1.51, 0.76, 0.42
101 processes: 100 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.1% user 5.3% system 0.1% nice 0.0% iowait 93.2% idle
Mem: 1030932k av, 575716k used, 455216k free, 0k shrd, 84404k buff
378948k actv, 11268k in_d, 16260k in_c
Swap: 1309288k av, 812k used, 1308476k free 183264k cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
1095 root 15 0 116M 51M 8156 S 2.3 5.1 9:56 0 X
1270 root 15 0 51444 49M 22204 S 0.0 4.8 0:56 0 netscape-bin
2266 root 15 0 21564 21M 15952 S 0.0 2.0 0:01 0 kdeinit
1307 root 15 0 15040 14M 9048 S 0.0 1.4 0:02 0 evolution-mail
1259 root 15 0 14060 13M 11192 S 0.0 1.3 0:01 0 kdeinit
2302 root 15 0 13700 13M 11112 S 0.5 1.3 0:00 0 kdeinit
1257 root 15 0 13540 13M 10876 S 0.0 1.3 0:01 0 kdeinit

Alf666

Your memory is fine. Swap is unused (or nearly. Maybe an old sitting process).

X is not the culprit :-)
X is your X-windows server. He is responsible for everything graphics your display on your box. You do not want to kill that :-)

I notice you still use an old netscape version which could easily be replaced by a more recent version of Mozilla.

This does not solve your problem though as nothing bad appears in what you're showing me there.

Your top shows that the system has been a bit loaded for the last minute, but that's it.

We'd need the same stuff, but at the moment when your box is very loaded (when you have your problem).

Karl Heinz Kremer

You may want to change the interval that top uses to display it's data to 1 second. To do that, use the "s" key and then type 1 <Enter>

This way, you get more current data.

SOLUTION

djluff

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omom

ASKER

you may be right about updatedb. In 'top' I did a <shift>-P to arrange by CPU use, and it was at the top. I'll try the other things you suggest.

omom

ASKER

none of my cron.* directories contain updatedb.

cron.daily directory contains:
00-logwatch logrotate rpm tetex.cron 0anacron makewhatis.cron slocate.cron tmpwatch

cron.weekly:
0anacron makewhatis.cron

cron.montly:
0anacron

cron.hourly is empty

here is crontab:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

# run-parts
01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

owensleftfoot

makewhatis.cron & slocate.cron are probably to blame.

omom

ASKER

So the format for the crontab file is:
minute hour day month weekday command
which means the its running cron.daily every day at 0402 (4:02 am)?

I'm usually not up at that hour. Does the 'job' get 'queued' when computer is not on?

djluff

Sorry, updatedb is run from the slocate script, which is run from cron.daily. If the PC isn't on when the cron.daily job's scheduled (4:02am), the job will be run at some stage after you next boot.

So you can either leave your PC on all night, or change the time. My home PC is on permanently, so I leave it set to 4:02am and don't have the problem. But my work PC is off all night, so I've got it configured to run at 12:45
(45 12 * * * ...). When it cuts in I know it's time to go to lunch!

omom

ASKER

ok, i'm going to try the lunch time schedule and see how that goes:

01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
30 11 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
50 11 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
10 12 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly