Re: Help urgently required

 On Mon 08/09/29 08:51, "Croombe F. Pensom" [email protected] wrote:
> My system (Asus with Celeron @ 3 GHz, 2 Gby RAM, 2 x 80 G HDs, Samsung
> printers, Canon scanner, IDE Zip drive, ADSL, running Fedora 9) is
> slower than molasses in January. When I use the system monitor, it
> indicates that something is using 99 to 100% of the processor. When I
> go into bash and do top, all that it indicates is that root is running
> xorg and taking around 50% of the processor (even though I am logged in as
> a user). I tried killing root's xorg process but it killed me as well. 

A portion of the X subsystem always has to run as root, in order to have appropriate access to hardware (usually related to graphics acceleration).  Killing it effectively kills your X server, causing all the X clients -- i.e. your user session -- to die.  This is normal and expected behaviour.

> Does anyone have any ideas as to where I should look for this phantom
> who is stealing my processor time and slowing me down such that it is
> a real pain in the butt trying to do anything on the system.

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that system load is a very difficult beast to understand.  I'd highly recommend familiarizing yourself with vmstat and iostat to get a better idea of what your system is doing.  Saying something is using 99-100% of the processor is a little mystical -- can you send the output of a "vmstat 1 5", please?  It's entirely possible you have a few blocking processes on the system that are causing problems; that will tell you if that's indeed the case.

It's also possible that you have a process that consumes 100% of the CPU for 30 seconds out of 60 (or 60 seconds out of 120, or ...).  Though I've seen dbus do this fairly regularly in the past, the first candidate for you is your xorg configuration.  Anything funky in there?  How many processors does your system have (i.e. is it a dual-core, or a hyper-threaded chip)?  What graphics card do you have?  What is the configured driver?  If you change it, does the problem go away?

Of course, the standard approach to problems like this is: take something away.  Does the problem go away?  If so, you've found the cause.  If not, take something else away.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  (Alternatively, if you unhook all the peripherals and the problem persists, you know it's the system.  If it doesn't, you know it's the peripherals -- it's the binary sort approach to troubleshooting.)

> If I create and log in as another user, it still demonstrates the same
> phenomenon.

Makes it definitely sound like something in your xorg (or system) configuration.

> I am getting desperate and feel like taking a sledge hammer to my
> system and giving it a reprogramming that it'll never forget.

The rush of satisfaction returned by vengeance tends to be but momentary; the lingering regret tends to last much longer.  Besides, the satisfaction of actually resolving the problem is a much better rush.

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