High CPU usage applet

[Timo Sirainen]

On May 7, 2009, at 10:35 PM, John McCabe-Dansted wrote:

> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> If some process has been eating 100% CPU for hours, there should be  
> some
> kind of a notification that it's happening. Like a small icon could
> appear to gnome panel and clicking it would show the process details  
> and
> allow to kill it.
>
> The following are relevant to this discussion
>  http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/11628 (similar idea)

Somewhat relevant, yes, but I think people talking in that page don't  
understand correctly the root cause of the problem. Linux scheduler is  
good enough nowadays that even lots of processes all eating 100% CPU  
don't make the system unusable. The problem comes from when some  
process eats all the memory and starts forcing other processes to swap.

I just tested this actually. I created 100 processes running an  
infinite loop, causing the system load on a 2 core machine to hit 100.  
It was a bit sluggish, but still perfectly usable.