Today, after about 20 minutes of logging in my Ubuntu 10.4, I notice the CPU and hard disk usage going up. top revealed that root was running emacs23.
It is basically the same behavior described at Ubuntu Forums
but there is no answer there. Any clue about this?
There is a cron job that executes emacs weekly for updating AUCTeX auto-loads.
You can expect that behaviour if you installed auctex. To confirm, check out if the file
/etc/cron.weekly/auctexis pressent.