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wisemonkey
Asked: 2011-10-30 13:36:56 +0800 CST

What are kswapd0, kworker/num:num, ksoftirqd/num?

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Exactly what are these services / programs. Apparently they make my system almost useless. Any one of them at point of time uses at least 50% CPU and continuous access to HDD.

I'm not exactly sure what exactly caused these to start. But here are few things I've done (right before I noticed laptop being unuseful):

Starting Gwibber services for twitter. Installing mbrola (speech synthesis) Installing gespeaker (downloaded from net its not available in repos).

And I think all these services starts when I start any google page (gmail, google+ etc.) -- maybe related to google talk plugin?

I'm gonna try not opening one of these pages (not sure for how long though) Thanks

hard-drive

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This are kernel processes. kswapd is basically responsible for the swap space management. If it gets busy that's usually a sign that you are low on RAM. Quite likely it causes the HD activity, which in turn keeps kworker and ksoftirqd busy.

    See Kworker, what is it and why is it hogging so much CPU? and Why is ksoftirqd/0 process using all my cpu? for an explanation about those processes.

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