Ubuntu

Problems after update; high cpu utilization

Asked by Paul Greene

I ran an update several days ago, and after re-start the system seems to have an enormously disk/cpu utilization, and it takes forever to get anywhere. The disk activity light is running solid, non-stop. I rebooted into Linux about 20 minutes ago and have only now gotten to a login screen. Any suggestions?

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Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

What is the machine? CPU and Memory? If you're not sure run this in a terminal window:

sudo lshw

Other things you can check:

Look at the swap file to see if it's being over-utilised

Look in the system monitor under processes to see what is running at high CPU. You can (usually) kill the process if it's mis-behaving, with the usual caveats about being careful not to kill or crash your system.

If you find the offending process use google to see if there's a known problem and a work-around

You can also use top to investigate running processes (type 'top' in a terminal)

Download the LiveCD ISO for the release and burn the CD or a boot Pendrive, then run the OS from that to see if it behaves better. A long term solution may be as simple as re-installing from scratch if the upgrade did something unexpected.

Chris.

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Paul Greene (pauljgreene) said : 		#2

It's an IBM Thinkpad T60 w/ 2 gigs of ram. Swap space has 0% utilization in top. CPU utilization is generally under about 15% in system monitor. CPU utilization doesn't actually seem to be that high; high disk utilization is the problem.
I tried booting into recovery mode and ran fsck on the hard disk with no apparent errors (the system dual boots with windows 7; windows is fine so I don't think there's a hardware issue)
I don't want to re-install; I've got a couple years of data and e-mails on there that I don't want to take a chance of losing.
Something is causing huge amounts of disk activity; how can you tell what that is?

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Andriopoulos Nikolaos (sirnicolas21) said : 		#3

on terminal

sudo apt-get install iotop
sudo iotop

tell me if that helps.

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