initramfs upgrade slows system severely

[peterzay]

This morning, synaptic offered 2 candidates after clicking on Mark All Upgrades.

Both were for initramfs.

After the upgrades were completed, I logged out of the admin account and into the regular user account.

The regular account is very sluggish. The 4 CPU cores consume between 0-50% at idle with no app running.

The time scale of the System Monitor is 15 seconds vs. the usual 60 seconds.

Booting into the admin account shows everything is normal. Switching to the regular account triggers the excessive CPU consumption. The Processes and Resources tabs of System Monitor are attached. I briefly saw a kworker process at 100% CPU.

As is, this system is no longer viable.

An urgent response would be appreciated.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: initramfs-tools 0.103ubuntu4.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.19.0-56.62~14.04.1-generic 3.19.8-ckt15
Uname: Linux 3.19.0-56-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.19
Architecture: i386
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Fri Mar 25 08:22:24 2016
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-04-29 (695 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release i386 (20140417)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: initramfs-tools
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[peterzay (peterzay)]

screenshot for Processes

[peterzay (peterzay)]

The guest user account is ok. The admin user account is ok.

The only account with this problem is the regular user account where all the web browsing occurs.

In System Monitor, if I click on either of the Processes or File Systems tabs and stay there for 15 seconds or more, then click back on the Resources tab, I get a low resource history for the past 15 seconds (see attached).

It is as if the Resources tab of System Monitor itself is somehow responsible for the excessive CPU usage.

[peterzay (peterzay)]

I completely removed gnome-system-monitor and reinstalled. It made no difference.

I repeatedly clicked on Refresh in the Processes tab of System Monitor.

Some suspiciously large CPU usage values were seen for gnome-system-monitor like 25% (see attached) while the system was idle.

[peterzay (peterzay)]

I will be installing Ubuntu 16.04 this month and thus lose the ability to analyze this bug as 14.04 will be overwritten.

Can we address this bug now, please, for the benefit of the 14.04 community?