Strange CPU and proc behavior (gkrellm)

[Peter Garrett]

On Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:00:50 +0930
squareyes <squareyes at internode.on.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> gkrellm is showing me some very strange behavior,
> 
> The CPU on idle is showing spiking from 0%-50%-0%-6%-48% etc., constantly.

Try running "top"  in a terminal to see which processes are causing the
spikes.
> 
> proc is showing 103 procs and 2 users, am the only one logged on. Am the 
> only user
> on this machine.

That's normal - the gnome session (or KDE or whatever session is running)
will show as a user (you, logged in) . If you have any terminals or tty
open, each one will show as a user, at least with terminals like
gnome-terminal that update utmp.

For instance I'm currently in Gnome with terminals open, and I see this
output from "who"

$ who
peter    tty2         2006-09-30 20:02
peter    :0           2006-09-25 16:49
peter    pts/1        2006-09-28 21:59 (:0.0)
peter    pts/2        2006-09-30 20:00 (:0.0)

The tty2 entry is there because I was using it from ctrl-alt-F2, and left
it logged in. The :0 is my Gnome session, and I have gnome-terminal open
with two tabs currently ( pts/1, pts/2 )  Gkrellm is showing 4 users,
which ties in with the above.

> Am using Dapper. Last applications I installed were libflash-mozplugin,
> and totem-xine-firefox-plugin, both of which I have removed, but still 
> showing
> this strange behavior. 

As I suggested above, this is a case where "top" might be more informative
than gkrellm - see what processes are jumping up and down :-)

Peter