100% CPU Usage

Y

Yogi Bear

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I have a G4 1Ghz iBook 14" with 640Mb Ram and 60Gb HDD. I'm runnign 10.3.9 with all the latest updates. Even after doing a fresh install recently my CPU usage is always still at 100% split between user and system. This occurs even on first boot with no programs running. The main users seem to be windows server and finder. I find it hard to believe that i never have any idle percentage.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? Could it be soem sort of programs running that i'm not aware of? (i know spyware doesnt exist) Can u clean out the system? Does anyone know how to fix this as it's killing my battery life badly.

Thanks
 
Open up /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app go to all processes, if you see anything out of the normal let us know
 
Yeah, until you - as that new user - do the same thing that let the first one go awry again... The 'new user' tip doesn't actually _solve_ the problem...
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I checked activity monitor and there doesnt seem to be anything strange running. Quite a few programs that open and close regularly but i think thats normal. Also it is not doing the same thing today so i dont know what the cause was. it never zapped performance just battery life. Thanks for the help.
 
But you are still seeing 100% cpu usage? Sort the activity monitor by %CPU. Something is hogging it.

And for the most part, applications don't just open and close on their own unless it is some sort of background process. On my system, this doesn't happen too often. As in, can't notice it unless I stare at the monitor for a long time. I imagine you are actually seeing the processes sort themselves as they use more/less cpu or whatever it is being sorted by.

It is possible that spotlight indexing is going on, but that shouldn't happen constantly. Tell you what. Log out. Log back in. Fire up only the activity monitor and sort by CPU%. See what is hogging it. Make sure your book is plugged in/not set to sleep and go away. Come back in 20-30 minutes and see if the processor is still cranking at 100%.

I have a hard time believing this is happening and there are no runaway processes.
 
My G5 iMac (also 10.3.9) does the exact same thing. At random times, that I cannot duplicate, CPU usage jumps to 100% and will stay there indefinately. "lookupd" is the process running at the root level.

I can still fully use the iMac as it seems lookupd will utilize anything that is "leftover" of the processor, whether that be 20% of the cycles or 80%.

I've let it go for hours in hopes it would "finish", but it never does. A restart cures it.

It's happened once immediately upon restart, but generally kicks in at some random time. Sometime hours into work, sometimes on its own, sometimes when the iMac is in it's 2nd week of non-shutdown operation.

Any ideas?
 
You can fire up the terminal and do a 'man lookupd' to see what it does. I can't explain why it is being such a hog though.

FYI, you can probably just kill the process from Activity Monitor instead of restarting.

When in doubt, repair permissions! jk
 
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