Historical cpu consumption information?

[Chris Tyler]

On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 10:53 -0700, Wendell Nichols wrote:
> My fedora 10 laptop routinely "freezes".  That means the menu's and 
> applications don't respond to mouse clicks.  After a few seconds (or 
> sometimes many seconds) it frees up and works normally again.  If I look 
> at the cpu consumption graph I can see that something had the processer 
> pegged at 100% but what?  during the episode there is no way to switch 
> to top or the ksysguard process list because the system is 
> unresponsive.  So how do I find out what caused the lockup?
> wcn

Wendell,

There are a few options here but probably the easiest is to set top
running with a long(ish) time between updates -- something like "top -d
30". When your laptop unfreezes, go to the top window and see what's
been sucking CPU.

-Chris