Arch Linux

TheGasolineWillBeOurs

Member

Registered: 2015-02-06

Posts: 65

[SOLVED] Laptop starts several processes seemingly out of nowhere

Since a few days, and most likely after updating Arch, my laptop goes completely crazy every few minutes/hours. When this happens, I cannot do anything anymore, not even move my cursor around. loadavg shows about 40 processes running constantly. I tried waiting for several hours, but it won't help. Power cycling is the only option I know of so far. I would like to understand what piece of software is the culprit, but since I have no access to the machine while it's happening, I don't know how to debug this.

My guess is Google Chrome, since it's the only software that I'm really using, otherwise I just use several terminals, mostly logged in to other machines.

How can I debug this? Is there any software showing me the CPU use in the past hour or so, after a restart? Or any other utility I could run?

I tried writing dmesg to a file and checked journalctl, but couldn't find a hint of what's causing it.
Any help is very much appreciated.

Last edited by TheGasolineWillBeOurs (2018-10-18 19:06:21)

katafrakt

Member

From: Kraków

Registered: 2010-06-08

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop starts several processes seemingly out of nowhere

You can certainly write top's output to a file and set it up in cron. The command would be:

top -b -n 1 >  $( date +%s ).txt

where n i number of iterations to save, so you may want to write more than one, but output will be less readable.

Last edited by katafrakt (2018-10-15 18:11:08)

TheGasolineWillBeOurs

Member

Registered: 2015-02-06

Posts: 65

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop starts several processes seemingly out of nowhere

Excellent, thank you very much! I started an endless loop, writing the top output into a file every few minutes. I hope to find the culprit like this.

TheGasolineWillBeOurs

Member

Registered: 2015-02-06

Posts: 65

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop starts several processes seemingly out of nowhere

Thanks to writing the top output to a file every few minutes, I have found the culprit: kswapd0

Apparently my system needs to swap with nothing else than a few browser tabs open. Sad reality. Thank you very much for the helpful comment again, katafrakt!

-MacNuke-

Member

Registered: 2013-01-29

Posts: 24

Re: [SOLVED] Laptop starts several processes seemingly out of nowhere

How many tabs you have opened is not the problem. It's the content of those tabs. Endless scrolling websites with many images and videos (Twitter, Facebook, 9gag, YouTube, Google Image Search ...) fill up the RAM quite quickly.

Last edited by -MacNuke- (2018-10-19 09:13:09)