Why is my system slowing down? - problem partially solved

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 14:30 -0700, Josef Lowder wrote:
> Problem solved by a surprise "fix" ... more details below. 
> 
> On Saturday 01 July 2006 10:49 am, Craig White wrote:
> > I'm gathering that kded is using up the majority of your cpu and is out
> > of whack. The first thing to do is to determine whether this problem is
> > with kde on your system in general or simply with your user settings.
> > The easiest way to figure this out is to create another user, log out of
> > of your user account and log into another user account. You need to
> > determine that after you log out that kde has completely released all
> > processes before you log in on the other account so it's probably a good
> > idea to obtain a virtual console <Control><Alt><F2> and log in as root
> > and run top to make sure that kded has ended. <Control><F7> should get
> > you back to login mode.
> >
> > Perhaps you want to get back to us with the outcome of this and let us
> > know which distro, which version of kde you are using.
> 
> Turns out that at least one major cause of my slow-down problem was apparently 
> that a program called 'kat' was running in the background.  Someone on 
> LinuxQuestions.org suggested killing it off as a first step and doing that 
> certainly made everything run much better -- actually pretty fast again. 
> 
> However, it seems evident that there must be some other issues that also need 
> to be investigated and perhaps resolved.  So, I'm still hoping that someone 
> can provide some additional guidance on what to check, what to change, and 
> how to make sure the system is properly configured. 
> 
> Even after "killing" 'kat,' 'top' was still showing very high percentages 
> under %CPU time -- in the very high 90% range. 
> 
> But then, after I created a new user, as Craig suggested, the %CPU time 
> dropped to less than 1% both for the new user and for myself as the original 
> user.  That is a mystery to me. 
> 
> Another mystery is that when I do: 'who' I see these results: 
> $ who
> joe      :0           Jul  1 17:20
> joe      pts/0        Jul  1 17:20
> joe      pts/1        Jul  2 14:15
> joe      pts/3        Jul  2 14:16
----
If I log in, that becomes :0

If I open say gnome-term, that becomes pts/0
Then I decide to open a new 'tab' in the terminal application, that
becomes pts/1

and so on.

I suspect these are also included in the 'users' count in top.

Craig

Craig