Comment 9 for bug 89135

Please can you check if you can run 'sudo initctl list' since this uses a different mechanism than running that command as a non-root user. I suspect that too will hang.

Looking back at the stacktrace in #5, it appears the problem is that some process is leaking memory such that Upstart is unable to grab any to allow it to work. The side effect of this being that init PID 1 will probably be consuming a lot of CPU as it continues to attempt to obtain memory.

To identify the cause of the low-memory scenario, you'll have to monitor your system with top / sar (sysstat) / nagios / vmstat /etc. You could even just run top in a loop redirecting to a file like this:

    top -b -d 60 >> /tmp/top.log

You'll need to tweak the -d parameter to something suitable to avoid chewing up too much disk though :-)

Also, check your system log to look for any odd entries - you might be lucky and find some 'Out of memory' messages, but possibly not if the process(es) causing the problem are high-priority root ones.