gnome-system-monitor does not show sudo processes' names

[Omegamormegil]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

I have noticed many times that CPU usage will be at 100% on the gnome-system-monitor Performance tab but the processes tab does not report a process using a high percentage of the CPU, even with the View > All Processes option set.

The top command does displays the process taking up the CPU.

I don't have specific steps to reproduce, but the un-shown process is usually a background processes such as updatedb. I run the system monitor panel applet and try to investigate when my system slows down because something is using the processor, so I am bothered by this bug often. I have noticed this behaviour in Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty.

[Tristan Greaves (tristan-extricate)]

I can reproduce this under jaunty.

1. Open up gnome-system monitor, "Processes" tab.
2. View -> All processes.
3. Open terminal, execute: "sudo updatedb"
4. Confirm updatedb is running (ps).
5. Refresh gnome-system-monitor list, updatedb does NOT appear in list of processes.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug is an upstream one and should be sent to bugzilla.gnome.org by somebody having the issue

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Tristan, your reproduce steps don't work for me. You are right that there is no process "updatedb" shown, but a process named "sudo" is shown with the PID of the updatedb-process. This is logical, I think, because sudo is the parent process which then runs updatedb.

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

Tristan's steps to reproduce seem to work great for me. This bug report is about the highly active updatedb (I'm not sure the mystery process is always updatedb, it was just my example) process not being shown in System Monitor. You are right that it does show sudo, but sudo is not assigned a high CPU %. Having only sudo listed in System Monitor while updatedb is running is not helpful in determining what is using the processor.

Top correctly displays updatedb at the top of the list while it is running. I don't understand why you say Tristan's steps to reproduce don't work because the parent process of the active process is shown. Are you saying that System Monitor is not designed to display the child process in this instance?

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Still can't replicate, but can add some discovery:

If sudo has been used in the session before and a password is not needed, system-monitor correctly identifies updatedb as the process-name. If a password is needed, sudo is shown as the name. The PID displayed by top, ps and system-monitor are the same, so they still point to the same process, there is no hidden one. Also, the reported CPU-Usage is the same for the sudo process in system-monitor and updatedb in top.

Still, the name confusion issue should be reported upstream, can you file a report on bugzilla.gnome.org?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

update-db doesn't use lot of cpu it does use ios a lot

[Omegamormegil (omegamormegil)]

Thanks for the additional testing Andreas. I've discovered this bug was already reported upstream. I've linked to the bug report.

[M. Qadri (maqadri)]

I don't know if this a relevant comment to toss into the mix, but a "sudo gnome-system-monitor" shows all the other processes that are probably daemons and anything run in sudo, as far as I can tell. I find no sudo in my process list in non-sudo-ed gnome-system-monitor. For sake of simplicity, I suppose this works, protecting sudoed processes, but maybe it's be better to have sudoed processes be view-only on a regular gnome-system-monitor, and a gksudo be called if someone wants to stop one of those processes?

[Jakob Unterwurzacher (jakobunt)]

This is how to easily reproduce the problem (see screenshot):

1) Press Alt F2
2) Type "sudo bash" (without the quotes), check execute in terminal, press enter, enter password if asked
3) Type "echo $$" (without the quotes) in the terminal to get the process number
4) You see a "sudo" process in g-s-m, a "bash" process in top

[Jakob Unterwurzacher (jakobunt)]

Note that https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313001 is a different bug. A new one should be filed describing this problem.

[Jakob Unterwurzacher (jakobunt)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313001 is about something else

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

As this is a fairly old bug with no recents reports or comments, and it seems to be fixed in System Monitor 3.3.4 on Precise, see the attached screenshot showing the result after following the steps to reproduce from the comments, I am marking this as Fix released.
Feel free to reopen this if you manage to reproduce this, and comment with the exact steps to reproduce the issue.