Re: [PLUG] processes hanging out

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2018 08:40:40 -0400
jeff <jeffv@op.net> wrote:

> Running Glances (great python cli monitoring program), there's one 
> command eating large amounts of CPU, up to 320%. If I kill the
> process, another one comes back, but not the same one (which the
> forums mention).
> 
> They're always  /tmp/CRED-TCA-RDNU-MBER/systemctl or sleep, gvfsd or 
> others (in Sleep state)

Why not use extended attributes to mark /tmp/CRED-TCA-RDNU-MBER/ read
only, so that when one of these things tries, it fails. I bet that'll
leave a stain in dmesg or some logs.

> 
> under FILE SYS, there's  "_ore/4110   81.6M used out of 81.6M"
> 2018-04-07 12:31:23 - WARNING on LOAD (1.0) or WARNING on MEM (72.5)
> 
> nothing via dmesg
> Comes back after reboot.
> research had me all over the place, including DNS and my car's
> muffler.
> 
> Xubuntu 17.10
> ok on space and RAM

You have to keep researching it. Meanwhile, you could write a daemon to
zap greedy daemons. That's just what I did back when I used Kmail,
which produced huge RAM dbus-daemon instances. Every five seconds my
daemon looked for > 94% processes, and put them in storage. If those
same daemons were still over 94% five seconds later, they were killed.
Nothing short of switching from Kmail to Claws-Mail cured the
underlying cause, but after I installed my new daemon, I didn't have to
worry about my computer slowing down anymore.

Because of the mention of systemctl, systemd is a possible suspect, so
I'd recommend running your new daemon from runit, s6 or
daemontools-encore (probably that order of desireability). Like
systemd, these process supervisors work on foreground processes, so
your daemon needn't (and shouldn't) background itself: Just do whatever
killing and logging are needed.
 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
April 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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