PID 11 using 400% CPU

[Manish Jain]

   Hello Dan,
   I was having multiple problems with my x86 installation, apart from
   the disc spinning continuously. Despite tuning many sysctl parameters,
   X clients would not open for non-root users ("max number of clients
   reached"); for root, they would open, but after about 30 minutes of
   playing xboard (gnuchess), the computer would simply shut down
   (without even a proper shut down sequence; worse that DOS BSOD - power
   off in a flash); while up, the speed and performance of the system was
   abysmal.
   I therefore yesterday downloaded the iso for amd64, which is the
   architecture of my system. I am going to install it and try it out
   over the weekend. Hope things will be better this time around.
   Thanks for all your suggestions and advice though.
   Regards
   Manish Jain
   [1]invalid.pointer at gmail.com
   On 05-Jul-11 19:50, Dan Nelson wrote:

In the last episode (Jul 05), manish jain said:

On 30 June 2011 10:26, Dan Nelson [2]<dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:

In the last episode (Jun 30), Manish Jain said:

   I have a strange problem with my 8.1 box. After booting, the hard
   disk goes into a full-speed never-ending spin.

To see what disk I/O is being done, try running "ktrace -dip 0 ; sleep
10 ; ktrace -C", to capture all syscalls done on the entire system (pid
0 plus children) for 10 seconds, then run "kdump -m64 | less" to view
the results.  Look for read or write calls.

It looks like ppp is doing a lot of read and write operations, which keeps
the disk spinning.  How do I set this right ?  Is there something wrong
with my ppp.conf (see below) ?

I bet that if you ran fstat or lsof on the ppp process, all the writes are
actually to your serial device or a tun device, not to disk.  ppp is
unlikely to cause much disk I/O.  You'll have to filter out the ppp process
and check your kdump output again.

References

   1. mailto:invalid.pointer at gmail.com
   2. mailto:dnelson at allantgroup.com