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#1 2022-02-17 09:52:33
- hobarrera
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- From: The Netherlands
- Registered: 2011-04-12
- Posts: 355
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Detecting high CPU usages with short lived processes
I recently had this issue where my laptop was slow, and fans were quickly running very fast, but running things like `top` didn't show anything using high CPU load or any red flags.
I'd no idea about the slowness or what was causing it.
After some lucky debugging, I found that I had a script doing, basically:
while [ true ] khal list
A single call isn't too bad, but inside a loop this was eating up CPU, and likely storage bandwidth. This didn't show up in top because a single invocation is very fast, and doesn't eat up that much CPU either.
How could I have detected this happening earlier? Or rather, how can I pinpoint this sort of issue next time it happens? It seems the tools I'm familiar with with never help finding out that something like this is happening (I'd just notice the system being slow).
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