Invisible process killing the CPU

[Nagy László Zsolt]

>
> One possibility is that your CPU fan has failed, in which case newer 
> machines would downclock itself extremely in order to avoid burning 
> out-- that might be an explanation for why your performance has 
> decreased so much.  
The cpu fan is not failed. This was the first thing I checked before I 
wrote to this list. The fan is spinning.

In my understanding, if the freq goes down then each program will use 
more of the total CPU time because of  the less computing capacity. So, 
having two processes, instead of 10% + 10% (total 20%) it would be 50% + 
50% (total 100%). But this is not the case. On this computer, everything 
is at 0% but the total CPU is at 100%.

> Otherwise, try using "ps auxw" to show all of the processes which are 
> running and see whether there are surprising things, 
I do not know enough about FreeBSD to tell what is surprising. :-( Would 
it help to send the output here?
> or perhaps try "top -o time" to sort by accumulated CPU time and look 
> at what's consuming the most...
Most CPU time is for the ppp daemon:

  PID USERNAME         THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU 
COMMAND
  244 root               1  96    0  3404K  2084K select   1:40  0.00% ppp

but I don't think that ppp is causing the problem, since it is at WCPU 0%.

Best,

   Laszlo