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Jake
Asked: 2012-04-25 02:28:26 +0800 CST

Where is this extra number coming from in ps aux

  • 772

A couple of processes returned by ps aux have an extra column. A monitoring tool I'm using is interpreting this as %CPU and reporting huge consumption.

Here's the truncated output:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
...
root       694  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Apr18   0:00 [kjournald]
root       728  0.0  0.0  49260  2544 ?        Ss   Apr18   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
syslog     732 51026191  0.0 195848 1736 ?     Sl   Apr18 57266230:36 rsyslogd -c4
102        736  0.0  0.0  23536   924 ?        Ss   Apr18   0:00 dbus-daemon --system --fork
root       775  0.0  0.0   6080   648 tty4     Ss+  Apr18   0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty4
root       779  0.0  0.0   6080   648 tty5     Ss+  Apr18   0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty5
root       783  0.0  0.0   6080   652 tty2     Ss+  Apr18   0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty2
root       784  0.0  0.0   6080   652 tty3     Ss+  Apr18   0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty3
root       786  0.0  0.0   6080   652 tty6     Ss+  Apr18   0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty6
daemon     791  0.0  0.0  18884   460 ?        Ss   Apr18   0:00 atd
root       792  0.0  0.0  21076  1020 ?        Ss   Apr18   0:00 cron
...      
ubuntu   21385  0.0  0.0  15256  1216 pts/0    R+   10:02   0:00 ps aux
postgres 22570  0.0  0.0  94864  6636 ?        S    04:34   0:16 /usr/lib/postgresql/9.0/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/9.0/main -c config_file=/etc/postgresql/9.0/main/postgresql.conf
postgres 22572 124088579  0.3 94996 27080 ?    Ss   04:34 17179869:11 postgres: writer process                                                                                                    
postgres 22573  0.0  0.0  94864  1684 ?        Ss   04:34   0:01 postgres: wal writer process                                                                                                
postgres 22574  0.0  0.0  96000  3320 ?        Ss   04:34   0:01 postgres: autovacuum launcher process                                                                                       
postgres 22575  0.0  0.0  66608  1724 ?        Ss   04:34   0:06 postgres: stats collector process                                                                                           
...

Note postgres writer process and syslog have something between PID and %CPU, they are also showing values for huge TIME. The server is running smoothly and top reports CPU% and load average seem normal.

What is that and is there anything I can do about it?

EDIT

Ok, so somehow I managed to miss the fact that it isn't an extra number, just a but one pushing the columns along. Still, 51026191% seems a bit excessive.

ps

0 Answers