something's eating my ram/processor

[Robin Laing]

Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> I won't start posting many details because I can't work out what is
> relevant. The symptoms are:
> 
> a.) logging off is taking close to 30 seconds, even if i've hardly used
> any apps. this is also true of the root user.
> 
> b.) nope, there are no network users.
> 
> c.) nautilus shows up as using 7.7MB and if i halt or kill it a nautilus
> windows pops up located on /home. That process then has the same
> properties. It even did this one time when I had logged in and only used
> firefox - never even started nautilus. It shows up in 'System Monitor"
> as Memory: 53.3MB, X Server Memory: 7.7MB, Nice: 0, ID: 6101, Status:
> Sleeping, RSS: 21.6MB, Shared: 10.4MB
> 
> d.) The little gnome applet shows "processor 100%" and everything takes
> for ever.
> 
> e.) evolution gets mail only every 15 minutes.
> 
> What can I do to extract useful information?
> 
> Hmm, I just thought to use winetools to kill all wine processes - that's
> brought processor down to normal levels.
> 
> nope that's not it - the processor usage drops as soon as i click on the
> gnome drawer holding my wine apps. and rockets again as soon as i close
> the drawer. killing all wine processes doesn't help.
> 
> Duncan
> 

This is only a start.

What does "top" show?

In a terminal, type in top and read the data in the first 7 lines. 
the "load average" is one indication.  Top will also show what process 
and how much resources it is using underneath.

I run SETI at home it uses about 95% of my CPU.

Look at the number of stopped processes and any waiting for io as 
these are indications of a bottle neck in your system.

I learned a long time ago that memory being used is no indication of 
how much memory is actually in use for a particular process.  Even on 
an idle machine, most memory can be in usage.
-- 
Robin Laing