System monitor: Resources displays 99% to 100% cpu

[Dee]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

Kernel version: linux-source.2.6.20-14

Under System Monitor, the "Resources" tab displays 99% to 100% cpu.

However, this value is false because of two reasons:

a) My cpu fan will always kick up its' speed whenever cpu usage moves past 60++%.

b) The "Processes" tab tells a different story: the total of the cpu usage of my applications tends to stay around the range of 5% to 30++% cpu, with a few exceptions.

This issue didn't happen before I applied the updates for Ubuntu.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. That works fine on my desktop. How many cpu do you have? What locale do you use? What version of Ubuntu are you using?

[Dee (dee24)]

Oh sorry for the delay in replying.

My power supply unit died.

However, this issue doesn't seem to be related to my hardware issues.

Anyways, I have 1 cpu and it is an AMD64 3000. I'm not sure whether it's Winchester or something else, though.

My locale: how do I find it? If you're talking about "locales" from Synaptic, it's 2.3.23

My version of Ubuntu: Feisty Fawn

[Dee (dee24)]

Oops, I forgot to mention that my version of Ubuntu is: Feisty Fawn Kernel 2.6.20.14

[Dee (dee24)]

Uhm, okay, someone told me to do :

echo $lang

Here's the output in Terminal:

en_SG.UTF-8

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

What value is listed by "top" on a command line?

[Dee (dee24)]

Here we go :

top - 14:24:41 up 4 min, 2 users, load average: 1.16, 0.83, 0.36
Tasks: 104 total, 4 running, 99 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.7%us, 1.3%sy, 97.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1035784k total, 576628k used, 459156k free, 15336k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 324084k cached

Geez, even command line displays 99++% cpu, too?! O_o;;

[Dee (dee24)]

Oh and I'm in WinXP now.

The "Performance" tab shows CPU Usage in the ranges of 0% to 5% most of the time.

[kid (kid82)]

I have the same problem: the system monitor shows a cpu's performance always next to 100 % but processes and command 'top' displays a very different situation, probably more true beacuse my pc runs very well without slowdown.
However after that the system monitor has crashed when it was opened, the problem seens to be vanished.

[Brett Alton (brett-alton-deactivatedaccount)]

Can you type in:

cat /proc/cpuinfo > cpuinfo.txt

and upload the ~/cpuinfo.txt file here?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you reply to the question?

[Brett Alton (brett-alton-deactivatedaccount)]

Looking at this screenshot: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/7193652/gnome_system_manager_processes.png it shows that you're running BOINC which uses 100% of your CPU when you're not using it.

The reason why gnome-system-monitor is not displaying it is because you're probably displaying "View > My Processes" while you installed BOINC as a system process.

[Jesse Aldridge (jessealdridge)]

I was having the same problem, but brettalton's explanation helped understand it.
I hadn't realized the system monitor only showed "My Processes" by default.
I think most semi-technical people like me would have this problem.

Maybe the "view process" options should be moved outside of the main menu?

There's room for a drop-down box on the left side in the same row as the "End Process" button.

[Monestri (monestri)]

This happened to me after applying the update to 8.08.

[marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra)]

Same here with Ubuntu 8.04 fully upgraded and updated.

Thank you

[Milan Krivda (milan-krivda)]

This bug is not related to wrong monitoring.

In terminal run top command. After this run System Monitor and click on Processes tab. In top command you can see CPU usage about 0 - 5% dependent running services and applications. After this click on Resources tab in system monitor. CPU usage jump higher due to needed graph drawing. On the last maximize System Monitor, my dual core system after maximizing paused playing of music for 3 seconds and CPU usage jumped to about 60% for all cores. In fedora core this problem isnt.

[Milan Krivda (milan-krivda)]

Graph drawing take too much cpu resources to draw. I dont know why, but it is a bug, because in fedora this problem isnt.

[l0wfr0w (jacob-cherkas)]

I was having the same problem but only on one of my machines so I decided to do some diggin'.

Here is what I found.

The hosts that exhibited the high cpu usage when moving windows around, minimizing and maximizing windows and most of all running system monitor (graph view) did not have xserver-sgl package installed.

Once the package was installed BAM, system monitor runs about 5-6% cpu in graph view. The most import part is that when moving windows and min/maxing them, there is no more lag!!!!!

So do the needful, sudo apt-get install xserver-sgl. Once installed, ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X.

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

I have an issue that gnome-system-monitor casues the CPU to 100% for a few seconds aprox once every 65 seconds lasting about 18 seconds. It only happens when gnome-system-monitor is open on any tab in forground or minimised to 'task bar'

The condition causes pulse-audio to skip while the gnome-system-monitor is acitve, which is how I noticed at first.

System Monitor 2.22.1, TOP work 'as on TV' without issues.

Hardy upgraded from gusty upgraded from feisty. All avalible updates applied.

As always let me know how I can help.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

I mark this as a duplicate of bug 187383.