Upgraded to Fedora 12 and CPU jumps to 100% randomly

[JonathanA]

Hello all,

I ran Fedora 10 for a while with no problems. Decided to upgrade to Fedora 12 and everything went smooth.. so it appeared. When I noticed the ACT light on my PC Case was lit up solid.

Running command 'top' it shows 95-98% CPU load for pulseaudio, killing the PID temp solves the problem, it can come back within 10min up to an hour. I've also noticed at time, there's multiple 'perl' running taking up majority of cpu load and it bogs the system down.

Even if I bootup to the log-in screen and DON'T log-in, the problem surfaces. So lately I have to shutdown my PC when I'm away, instead of just locking the system.

Any input would be appreciated, thank you

[del_diablo]

Well, then we have spotted the problem: Pulseaudio, an extension to alsa.
Remove pulse, and everything should be working again.

[dd_wizard]

You might want to search the forums before you remove pulseaudio. You'll be amazed at all the things yum wants to remove along with it. There's a good thread somewhere on which package to remove, and how to kill the pulseaudio server. That's the preferred method, iirc.

dd_wizard

[JonathanA]

Well I tried unistalling pulseaudio server, but think I did miss a few packages as I can still see it in processes. It seems either pulseaudio OR perl will cause CPU load to 100%. So not sure if I have 2 problems or 1.

I left my PC on 4 hours ago and came back to this

[root@jaber Jonathan]# top

top - 00:10:41 up 4:44, 2 users, load average: 2.11, 2.15, 2.12
Tasks: 174 total, 2 running, 163 sleeping, 9 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 7.3%us, 4.3%sy, 88.4%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1027080k total, 1012000k used, 15080k free, 7112k buffers
Swap: 2064376k total, 1092k used, 2063284k free, 704808k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
26197 root 30 10 5448 1888 1580 R 89.3 0.2 1:06.03 perl
2431 Jonathan 20 0 48320 12m 9652 S 4.0 1.2 0:02.06 gnome-terminal
1425 root 20 0 81636 33m 10m S 3.0 3.3 5:30.42 Xorg
2211 Jonathan 20 0 304m 82m 22m S 1.7 8.2 7:31.35 firefox
1749 Jonathan 20 0 56508 19m 10m S 0.7 2.0 0:08.93 gnome-panel
1770 Jonathan 20 0 109m 7992 6728 S 0.3 0.8 0:09.65 gnome-volume-co
25881 Jonathan 20 0 21464 9276 7780 S 0.3 0.9 0:00.45 metacity
26329 root 20 0 2560 1088 824 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.02 top
1 root 20 0 2028 688 468 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.98 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.98 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 events/0
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
8 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netns

Perl will go as high as 98%. Unlike pulseaudio, trying to kill perl PID does nothing, only way is to reboot the system.

[diamond_ramsey]

JonathanA, thank you for your posts.

Originally Posted by JonathanA

Well I tried unistalling pulseaudio server, but think I did miss a few packages as I can still see it in processes. It seems either pulseaudio OR perl will cause CPU load to 100%. So not sure if I have 2 problems or 1.

I left my PC on 4 hours ago and came back to this

Perl will go as high as 98%. Unlike pulseaudio, trying to kill perl PID does nothing, only way is to reboot the system.

Things that look strange -

Cpu(s): 7.3%us, 4.3%sy, 88.4%ni
Mem: 1027080k total, 1012000k used

Things that look bad -

Tasks = 2 running 9 stopped

Along with Perl, at 89.3%, I wonder why the gnome-volume-control-applet is at 109MB of virtual space...

26197 root 30 10 5448 1888 1580 R 89.3 0.2 1:06.03 perl
2431 Jonathan 20 0 48320 12m 9652 S 4.0 1.2 0:02.06 gnome-terminal
1425 root 20 0 81636 33m 10m S 3.0 3.3 5:30.42 Xorg
2211 Jonathan 20 0 304m 82m 22m S 1.7 8.2 7:31.35 firefox
1749 Jonathan 20 0 56508 19m 10m S 0.7 2.0 0:08.93 gnome-panel
1770 Jonathan 20 0 109m 7992 6728 S 0.3 0.8 0:09.65 gnome-volume-co
25881 Jonathan 20 0 21464 9276 7780 S 0.3 0.9 0:00.45 metacity

I think that something is way unhappy in the gnome world possibly, too.

When this happens, could you do the following:

ps -ef | grep perl

I wonder what your system is trying to run perl for...

Hopes this helps.

[JonathanA]

Sorry for the late response. On 12/23/2009 my PC downloaded some updates and problem has not happened since. So I'm not sure what exactly fixed the problem, but it's been up since then and no high CPU.

Thanks to all for the help.