10 minutes ago I was just surfing the web as usual on my Ubuntu 10.04, when all of a sudden the system became slow. I realized that the CPU usage is 99%. I opened System monitor and everything seemed fine. I couldn't see any process that used a lot of CPU. I logged out and logged in, and CPU usage was still 99%. Then I rebooted and now everything is ok.
What happened and why couldn't I see the process that used so much CPU? What to do if that happens again? I want to solve the problem, not to reboot every time that happens.
Here it is again. It's because of Gparted. Everything worked fine until I started it. And now it's 99% again. I closed Gparted and still 99%. I can't find gparted process. Here is the "top" output
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1570 tuks 20 0 40720 3644 2832 S 29 0.1 2:04.88 gvfs-gdu-volume
1572 root 20 0 15800 3156 2444 R 24 0.1 1:45.74 udisks-daemon
2058 tuks 20 0 649m 257m 34m S 22 6.4 161:26.52 firefox
1556 tuks 20 0 18676 7104 5504 R 16 0.2 1:08.85 gdu-notificatio
906 messageb 20 0 9292 7448 760 R 16 0.2 1:09.08 dbus-daemon
2066 tuks 20 0 41864 11m 8412 S 16 0.3 1:11.66 update-notifier
500 root 18 -2 2624 944 332 S 6 0.0 0:26.09 udevd
6250 tuks 20 0 360m 150m 21m S 5 3.7 45:30.14 plugin-containe
1065 root 20 0 78444 36m 12m S 4 0.9 224:50.06 Xorg
1427 tuks 9 -11 158m 10m 8592 S 3 0.3 23:28.05 pulseaudio
369 root 20 0 4104 1268 980 S 3 0.0 0:11.06 mountall
1 root 20 0 2792 1720 1200 S 2 0.0 0:09.07 init
392 root 20 0 2312 824 612 S 2 0.0 0:06.68 upstart-udev-br
394 root 16 -4 2644 964 308 S 1 0.0 0:05.96 udevd
1419 tuks 20 0 57288 21m 11m S 1 0.5 8:21.97 python
1411 tuks 20 0 83048 30m 9524 S 1 0.8 50:33.01 compiz
1444 tuks 20 0 57152 21m 11m S 1 0.5 6:06.30 python
6834 tuks 20 0 79980 27m 19m S 1 0.7 5:49.54 smplayer
1438 tuks 20 0 58376 22m 11m S 1 0.6 4:30.69 python
1440 tuks 20 0 239m 56m 19m S 1 1.4 7:45.33 skype
5045 tuks 20 0 52204 13m 9.8m S 1 0.3 0:01.65 gnome-terminal
Now I logged out and logged in and CPU usage is normal. I started Gparted and this time everything is ok. I am very confused
Well you could run
topcommand in the terminal to know the process eating away your CPU and if you want to kill the process you just have to note down the PID of the process (left side of the terminal under PID). Once the process PID is known, you can kill the process by runningkill PID XXXXHope this helps..