Re: [Pan-users] Re: freeze, high CPU getting new headers

[Kurt Schilling]

walt wrote:
> On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:57:21 -0400, Kurt Schilling wrote:
>
> > Greg Lee wrote:
> > > On Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:32:34 +0000, Matthijs Benschop wrote:
> > >
> > > > Btw, I always get segfault when closing 'post article' window and when
> > > > expanding the group list in the left pane...
> > > I also get a fault when I attempt to expand the unsubscribed group
> > > list. That has happened ever since I started using Pan a little over a
> > > year ago. (I work around it by entering patterns in the Group Name box
> > > and viewing unsubscribed groups that way.)
> > ...
> > In terms of the current discussion of the high CPU cycles, I have not
> > seen this with previous versions of xorg. But since the installation of
> > HH8.04, I have consistent high cpu cycling. It seems that this is a
> > known bug in Ubuntu that is related to xorg and the System Monitor...
>
> Thanks for letting us know about this, Kurt.  Just to clarify a bit,
> this high CPU usage you refer to happens even without running pan?
> Do you mean it happens only when running System Monitor?  Is that the
> gnome system monitor panel applet, or something else?

As I've been trying to track things down on my machine, I installed 
htop. What I find is that htop and/top/gnome-sysmonitor and xorg are the 
primary culprits in hogging cpu cycles. If you open the GUI for SysMon, 
the CPU pegs out at 100% and stays there. So on my machine it is 
apparently something related to htop/top in the CLI mode or the 
Gnome-SysMon (GUI). If there was some other way of looking at CPU 
cycling/resource utilization I'd be glad to try it.



> In any case, I don't see the problem on my install of Ubuntu 8.04, but
> I do compile my own kernel FWIW.

Here's the link and most of the pertinent text:

<q>
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-monitor/+bug/187383

Binary package hint: gnome-system-monitor

Just opening system monitor (not sure if it's always) causes one of my 
CPUs to go to 100% usage. The process Xorg is the one that actually has 
all the CPU usage but I guess it must be system-monitors fault.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu hardy (development branch)"
dpkg -l | grep xorg-core
ii xserver-xorg-core 2:1.4.1~git20080118-1ubuntu2 Xorg X server - core 
server
$ dpkg -l | grep gnome-system
ii gnome-system-monitor 2.21.5-0ubuntu1 Process viewer and system 
resource monitor f

I tried to find out what was going on and started a strace on the Xorg 
process and that completely locked upp my system. Tried to switch to a 
console with ctrl-alt-f1 but no success. Remotely connected to the 
system with SSH and found that the CPU usage was good and as soon as I 
killed -9 the strace process the system was OK again.

<q>

IIRC this bug was filed apparently several months ago.

> Oh, and most important of all, are you running the 64-bit Ubuntu?


No, just the plain-jane 32-bit HH with the generic kernel. 2.6.19-24 
IIRC. No enough horsepower on my machines to compile my own kernel :-{
Not that I'm adept enough to try it ATM, still quite the rookie at *nix.

With warm regards,

Kurt Schilling