50-60% CPU load when running nothing.

[manosagn]

My Lenovo was running very hot lately so I took a look and found that it has constantly a 50-60% load, even when "idle". On a boot everything looks ok, yet even opening the simplest of application makes the CPU run at 50-60%. Closing open applications does not help. Any ideas?

lsb_release -a gives:

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Distributor ID:	LinuxMint
Description:	Linux Mint 14 Nadia
Release:	14
Codename:	nadia

uname -a gives: (hostname removed)

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Linux ******* 3.5.0-17-generic #28-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 9 19:31:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Some top lines of top are: (username removed)

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%Cpu(s): 44.9 us,  8.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 43.5 id,  2.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.4 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   2009068 total,  1823728 used,   185340 free,    74824 buffers
KiB Swap:  3905532 total,   123900 used,  3781632 free,   863064 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                        
 2712 ********  20   0  458m 104m  12m S   2.9  5.3   3:28.02 skype                                                                                          
 1391 root      20   0  177m  25m  13m R   1.4  1.3   2:13.50 Xorg                                                                                           
17399 ********  20   0 10404 4688  596 R   1.4  0.2   0:00.03 kpsewhich                                                                                      
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.5  0.0   0:08.07 ksoftirqd/0                                                                                    
 1492 tomcat7   20   0 1478m  40m 6464 S   0.5  2.1   0:17.67 java                                                                                           
 1877 ********   9 -11  364m 5072 3120 S   0.5  0.3   0:34.49 pulseaudio                                                                                     
 1907 ********  20   0  280m 2628 2356 S   0.5  0.1   0:00.41 gvfs-afc-volume                                                                                
 1911 ********  20   0 1107m  32m  14m S   0.5  1.7   0:10.73 caja            

[viking777]

That's just weird. The answer is obviously not in 'top' (though it should be). In that case open up the System Monitor application and have a look through there for any culprits. The "44.9% us" entry in top indicates that it is a user process that is taking up most of the cpu time not any system process, so the default 'My Processes' view in System Monitor should be fine, but if you don't find anything in there go the the 'View' menu and select 'All Processes' instead and have another look. System Monitor is dynamic - it updates about every 3 seconds, so monitor it for a while and see if anything shows itself. Out of interest the top memory and cpu hog on my system is always Firefox, so you could close that down and see what happens.

[manosagn]

Sorry for not responding to your suggestion. The problem seems to have disappeared. I'll keep your tip in mind as I intend to use my laptop a lot more over the next week.