My CPU usage keeps spiking a lot. I can be sitting on my desktop and my CPU usage will go up to around 90%, according to Conky. Here is the output of top:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3183 thomas 25 5 868m 66m 19m S 12 1.7 1:14.99 chromium-browse
1151 root 20 0 149m 45m 19m S 11 1.1 8:07.03 Xorg
5739 thomas 20 0 190m 19m 12m R 6 0.5 0:00.19 nvidia-settings
1891 thomas 20 0 134m 34m 4436 S 4 0.9 1:35.87 beam.smp
4840 thomas 20 0 433m 18m 12m S 3 0.5 0:01.13 gnome-terminal
23 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:46.66 kacpid
And right now my CPU usage is around 70%. It's as if there is some malicious process or something hidden away just eating up my CPU usage.
If it helps to know, I'm running a Core 2 Duo with the nvidia drivers installed, version 260.19.06.
2 Answers
This CPU usage spike usually tends to come from programs that need to run periodically (like gwibber-service) to update something in the background. You should find any applications that are doing this (using system monitor/top it's easy to catch the culprit in action).
BTW it happens to me as well, and I was able to determine a few culprits: docky, my music player (banshee and rhythmbox are both rather bad behaved at times, but probably because of too many plugins), gwibber, and apt (looking for updates in the background). These may not be the cause of your problems, but you can try seeing if any are responsible.
I noticed the same problem after upgrading to 10.10. I did a release upgrade thru Update Manager. I noticed my memory was getting used up slowly and the processor cores were taching at around 95% for all cores. This was strange as nothing was running and processes and memory wasn't being used by anything. I did notice a lot of files named flush 0:## that were using no memory and also 0-byte files in the directory. I did a clean install w/ 64-bit 10.10 Same problem. I removed shotwell because I heard it had a memory leak. No difference. Fixed my problem by going back to 64-bit 10.04 Now my system just idles, the memory stays the same overnight, and is quicker starting. And I also moved my laptop back to 32-bit 10.04 'cause I just like to have some continuity, not that I noted the problem in 32-bit 10.10
