How to clear CPU congestion?

[der.hans]

Am 12. Feb, 2007 schwätzte Josef Lowder so:

> .
> I asked this question a while ago and never did get a solution,
> so thought I would try again.  My system normally runs with a
> very small number appearing for "X" under %CPU ... but sometimes
> something happenss that causes it to jump to a high number (as
> shown below) and the only way I have found to clear it is to
> reboot.  Then it runs fine for quite a while until the same
> problem occurs again.  Surely there must be some way to clear out
> whatever is causing this log jam other than reboot.
>
> Any suggestions?

Try switching to a virtual console and back.

<ctrl><f1>
<ctrl><f7>

Another thing is to check for apps with memory leaks. Once in top, use m
to sort by memory usage. If you see another application, usually a web
browser for me, using a lot of memory, quit that application. Normally
when this happens for me X is also using a lot of memory.

Usually quitting whatever application gets X to also release the extra
resources and everything's fine again.

Looks like what you're experiencing isn't due to heavy memory usage, but
maybe that'll help anyway.

ciao,

der.hans

> top - 11:12:12 up 7 days,  2:14,  5 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.07, 1.08
> Tasks:  82 total,   2 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 56.3% us, 11.6% sy,  5.9% ni, 25.9% id,  0.1% wa,  0.2% hi,  0.0% si
> Mem:    515484k total,   417720k used,    97764k free,    11952k buffers
> Swap:  2096440k total,     2696k used,  2093744k free,   244728k cached
>
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 3364 root      25   0 48356  38m 4732 R 97.2  7.6   6673:44 X
>    1 root      16   0  1564  540  472 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.50 init
>    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
>    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:02.82 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   0:00.11 kblockd/0
>  113 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.62 pdflush
>  114 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.34 pdflush
>  116 root      19  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
>  115 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:03.71 kswapd0
>  704 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 kseriod
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
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