Strange memory/cpu behavior

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 01:54:13PM -0700, Yuri wrote:
> I have STABLE-71 machine with 2GB memory and single 2GHz AMD3200 CPU.
>
> There is one large active process slowly growing in memory from 500MB to  
> 1300MB, not reading or writing any files.
> There are many dormant processes almost not running at all.
> Swap size remains constant (185MB). Total physical memory used remains  
> 2GB (whole memory used).
>
> ps shows that the active process only takes 15-18% CPU. But total CPU  
> consumption on the machine is 100% (user).
>
> Since the active process grows but swap+physical memory doesn't grow I  
> assume that OS pushes out other processes code since it's unchanged on 
> disk.
>
> Why such operation is so expensive and takes 80-85% CPU?
> Why total of all user processes CPU consumption is ~20% but total  
> CPU(user) consumption shows as 100%? Shouldn't they be the same.

Regarding the "memory bloat", what field in top(1) are you basing this
on?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |