Mine does this as well.  I'm using an archaic prerelease version of 
Fedora, so I'm not surprised.  I have been able to isolate it to firefox 
and thunderbird running out of memory, causing excessive swap use and 
thrashing.  I close both apps, let VM recover, then restart both.  I 
also have another issue (can't remember the bug I posted), but the 
system can't spawn a shell after a few days due to some memory issue.  I 
guess I should reinstall :)

Try using iostat and vmstat when the system is happy and when it is 
under stress and compare them (esp vmstat).  Post results here.  I find 
"vmstat 5 10" or even "vmstat 2 10" to be very useful.

George Toft, CISSP, MSIS
623-203-1760




Josef Lowder wrote:
> .
> My system cruises along fine for days without any CPU overload
> ('top' normally shows CPU usage at about 2%) ... and then something 
> happens (I don't know what) that causes the CPU% (as shown in the 
> 'top' results below) to shoot up to 90+%. 
> 
> How can I figure out what causes this aberration? 
> And is there some way to unclog it without having to reboot? 
> 
> 
> top - 12:17:28 up 7 days, 50 min,  3 users,  load average: 2.08, 2.08, 2.25
> Tasks:  87 total,   1 running,  86 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 50.7% us,  4.5% sy,  4.9% ni, 39.6% id,  0.1% wa,  0.1% hi,  0.0% si
> Mem:    515484k total,   447644k used,    67840k free,    78252k buffers
> Swap:  2096440k total,    79664k used,  2016776k free,   130016k cached
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  3098 root      25   0 80492  62m 4460 S 98.9 12.5   5233:50 X
>     1 root      16   0  1560  480  460 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.76 init
>     2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.34 ksoftirqd/0
>     3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:03.16 events/0
>     4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
>     5 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
>     7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
>    81 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.47 kblockd/0
> 
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