after one hour or so, cpu goes up to 100% and slows the whole system

[Stefano Costa]

when attending to classes, I use to leave my laptop on on the desk. When I come back after one or two hours, it always requires one minute or more to wake up completely just from the screensaver (no sleep or suspend function).

after that, it is however running slower than ever. CPU is near 100%, all apps require some thirty seconds to get started (i'm talking about the gnome terminal, not firefox or OOo). The only solution to this is to restart Ubuntu from zero :(

I tried to understand if there's an application that eats up CPU, but what's more strange is that while it's, say, 98%, doing ps aux there is no application with more than 3-4% CPU, and if I try to sum the value for every process, it is something like 20 or 30, so I don't know where to start from.

I have an updated Ubuntu Breezy. My system is a ACER Aspire WLMi1652 with Intel Centrino (i686). I use kernel 2.6.12-686

[Danilo Piazzalunga (danilopiazza)]

Use gnome-system-monitor or top to check the CPU usage and to see which process uses more CPU most of the time. You should be able to see which program is responsible.

Additonally, try to sort them by memory usage and check if memory usage grows over time.

[Danilo Piazzalunga (danilopiazza)]

The next time when CPU usage goes to 100%, try to kill update-notifier: if this makes the problem go away, then this is a duplicate of #5612.

[Stefano Costa (steko)]

gnome-system-monitor seems to me just like a GUI to ps, isn't it? anyway they output the same for me.

recently this problem seems to have vanished. I thought it was after I upgraded my fglrx drivers: xscreensaver has some nice "3d" screensavers, and perhaps those were responsible for the general slow down. now all seems to work quite right.

sorry about my confused posts, I just can't get to understand what was wrong, the xscreensaver is just a guess, obviously..

[Danilo Piazzalunga (danilopiazza)]

I was suggesting using g-s-m or top because you can see the CPU usage changing over time, instead of just seeing the puntual value.

About the screensavers: (hopefully) they don't use CPU power when they are not running ;-)

[Lee Revell (rlrevell)]

I think I am having a similar problem with my desktop when I leave it overnight: there's no sleep or suspend but it takes like 1-5 minutes from hitting a key or moving the mouse until I get my desktop back. It just sits with the last frame of the screensaver displayed for ever. - it would be faster to hit the reset button.

I believe I only had the 3D screensavers installed, and I have slow 3D hardware (600Mhz VIA C3 using "via"
 driver), but this should not kill the machine for 5 minutes.

[Lee Revell (rlrevell)]

FWIW I don't have the problem where the CPU stays pegged after the screensaver terminates - my machine works normally.

[Lukas Fittl (lfittl)]

This has nothing to do with the ubuntu-meta source package, rejecting it for ubuntu-meta.

[Stefano Costa (steko)]

this was related to beagle in breezy. stopping best and beagled eliminated the problem.