100% cpu and ram usage!

[Archibald]

I just enabled a system monitor in the toolbar of kde on my gentoo box. Perhaps I shouldn't have, because what I see is almost 100% of ram is used (750 megs!), and about 98% cpu (amd athlon 2600+)is used by a process called lxdialog. Why is this? The system is working well and slick, so it does not seem to be correct that the system is using this much memory and cpu. Why is this?

[leonpmu]

If you do a [ctrl]+[esc] what do you get? Also sort the stuff by CPU usage, xdialog seems to be a windows this open explaining something, and if it has too many pretty graphics and you don't have the right display driver, you will get 100% CPU usage.

Hope it helps

L

[Archibald]

ctrl+ esc just gives me the start menu. when running the system monitor i get about 95% cpu usage by lxdialog and about 4% by X. What is the lxdialog process?

[retsaw]

Most of your RAM is most likely being used as cache and this is normal, you can check how much is cache is used by typing "free" on the command line.

As to the CPU usage, it is most likely a bug in some program, but if it doesn't affect your system performance you needn't worry about it. I did have a similar problem with a kernel process (I can't remember the name) using up all the spare CPU, which was solved by passing "noapic" as a boot option, though this may not solve your problem, you could try it.

[Archibald]

ok, seems the physical memory which is actually used is at about 200 megs.. anyway, the big cpu load disappeared after restarting, so I'll guess I'll try doing somethingabout it if it shows up again. Thanks for the help...

[rdeschene2]

In a shell, if you use the command: top

it will display the running processes, and show which process is using a disproportionate %CPU cycles. It will also display the PID# for that process which you can then use to kill it.

e.g. if the PID for command "think" is 1200 and it is using 95% cpu kill by entering

kill 1200