[CUBE] 100% Load Wouldn't Go Away

[Brian Kurotsuchi]

It's difficult to know just from your symptoms, unless it's a "known problem".

Normally a reliable way to determine the cause is to run "top" or the "Process
Viewer".  It will should you if you a particular process is a runaway and
taking the majoority of the processor time.  After you figure out what's doing
it, you can kill that process, and possibly restart it if needed.

If killing and restarting sounds too scary, at least you will know it was
"inetd" or whatever which is causing the problem.

The top that comes with OS-X seems to need these flags to sort by CPU time,
run it in a Terminal:

% top -u -s5

If your system has glacial performnace, it's sometimes nice to have sshd
running so you can log in remotely and fix the problem.  Remember - just
because the user interface is having problems, doesn't mean that the OS is
having problems.

Brian

Quoting Thubten Kunga (Kunga at FutureMedia.org):
> 100% Load Wouldn't Go Away
> 
> I use "Cee Pee You" from http://www.unsanity.com to monitor my 
> processor load in the menu bar. Running old 500 MHz Cube with a 100 GB 
> WD Drive and a couple of 80 GB FireWire Drives hanging off it.
> 
> I came across an unusual load problem today that I wonder if anyone 
> else has had this happen to them or which someone might be able to 
> explain.
> 
> I noticed that my load was stuck on 100% and everything was working at 
> a glacial pace accordingly. As I progressively quit Netscape, 
> Photoshop, Safari, Mail etc. the load remained at 100%. I got down to 
> just the finder and the http://www.macunicorn.com TurboMem that I 
> always have running in the background. Still 100% load. Quit TurboMem 
> and the load remained at 100%.
> 
> So I shut down the entire Cube, started it back up and now the load is 
> back to a normal 10% ±5%. So I'm just wondering if anyone knows the 
> mystery of why my processor load got stuck on 100%?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> k