From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Oct 10 12:37:09 2007
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Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:36:29 +0300
From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Paul Schmehl <pauls@utdallas.edu>
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Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: X (xorg 7.3) consumes all the CPU
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On 2007-10-09 22:01, Paul Schmehl <pauls@utdallas.edu> wrote:
> Is there a way to start a process so that memory and CPU usage can be
> tracked closely enough to determine what the cause of 100% CPU use
> would be?  I've got a box, recently installed 6.2 RELEASE with xorg
> 7.3 installed, and when X is started, CPU goes to 100% and stays
> there.
> 
> Here's the bad machine
> 1510 pauls         1   0    0   277M  7076K rdnrel 0  13:41 100.05% Xorg
> 
> Here's my desktop
>  868 root          1  96    0   202M   134M select 119:09  0.00% Xorg
> 
> As you can see, memory and CPU use is sky high on the "bad" box.
> Rather than blow it away and reinstall, I'd like to try to figure out
> what's wrong and fix it.  What utilities could I use to do that?

Are you running `powerd' in `adaptive' mode on the 100%-CPU system?

I've seen this happening on FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT a few times, when
powerd(8) lowered the CPU frequency to a minimum and X.org started
consuming 100% CPU.