something consumes all my resources

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Marco Mandl <marco.mandl at gmx.at> wrote:
> After every boot I can work for a while. But then the system starts to
> work on something. There is a lot of disk access and the ventilation is on
> full speed. The system becomes unusable. The mouse moves every ten
> seconds, it takes minutes to switch windows and hours to start an
> application.
> 
> The system monitor shows no process with a high cpu usage. top shows no
> busy process either but %sy is very high.
> 
> Can e.g. beagle produce that effect? If yes, why don't I see a high cpu
> usage of a corresponding process?

I noticed something similar on my machine.
What happened in my case, was that I installed the game
"flight-gear" (a flight simulator as the name suggests) from the Ubuntu
repository. I would start the game, it would load successfully.
The helicopter would sit there on the runway, engines off, nothing
happening, then after 30 seconds, suddenly, the machine would act as
yours: extreme and constant hard drive activity for no reason, rendering
the system 99,999% unresponsive. With the remaining 0.001% ;-) I
managed to fire up the system monitor, and I noticed that the swap file
was growing at the speed of light (again for no reason), way faster
than even hard drive physics dictates ! That is, after only a few
seconds of trashing, it would fill my 2GB swap partition ! :-O
So I "killed" Flight-gear, and instantly, all by magic, the 2GB of
used swap disappeared as quickly as they appeared, and the system was
again 100% responsive, as if nothing had happened, phew !
Needless to say I am more than reluctant to try flight-gear again
anytime soon, though I am afraid that since the swap is probably
managed by the kernel not applications, I am actually quite afraid that
it might be a rather scary kernel bug, probably triggered by
flight-gear, but still, the kernel was happy to obey this non-sense
swap drama that flight-gear somehow fancied !

So, next time it happens on your machine, try killing beagle (or other
non-standard stuff you might have installed yourself and that's running
in the background), and see if that helps, and check swap usage to see
if you notice the same non-sense I witnessed.

HTH,


--
Vince