PID 11 using 400% CPU

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 30), Manish Jain said:
> 
>    Hello All,
>    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.

> 'ps waux' always shows pid
>    11 as taking 400% CPU utilization :
>    /root # ps -up 11
>    USER   PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ   RSS  TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
>    root    11 400.0  0.0     0    32  ??  RL    7:22PM 166:35.46 [idle]
>    I have tried multiple tweaks to resolve this - all to no effect. The

As for this, what's to resolve?  The idle process is a placeholder with one
thread per CPU that accounts for time the CPU isn't doing any work.  If you
want to reduce it's "CPU use", run other CPU-intensive processes :)  BTW,
Windows has the same thing if you look at task manager; it's called "System
Idle Process" there.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com