Tiger eats 100% CPU

B

brendan

Registered
Hi,

I have a PB G4 12" 1.33 GHz 768 MB Memory and I installed Tiger yesterday. I noticed that my fan in my PowerBook is constantly running and checked my cpu usage. It is 0% idle all the time. I've de-installed my Cisco VPN Client to see if this kernel module was the problem but it did not bring down my system usage.

23.9% user, 76.1% sys, 0.0% idle
20.2% user, 79.8% sys, 0.0% idle
30.4% user, 69.6% sys, 0.0% idle
41.8% user, 58.2% sys, 0.0% idle
30.9% user, 69.1% sys, 0.0% idle​

My PB has suddenly become a noisy machine :(

Does anyone has the same expirience, knows how to diagnose Kernel/System processes or a resolution for this problem?

Many thanks,

Brendan Bank
 
You can use Activity Monitor that's located in Utilities to see which process is eating up all the CPU time. If you're terminally inclined, you can type 'top -o cpu' in the commandline. I think you have a rogue process somewhere (a crashed app perhaps?) that's eating up your CPU time. See if restarting your computer helps.
 
I noticed this on my PowerBook yesterday. I was getting 100% CPU when I installed Virex 7.5.1.

I notice that the background service was taking 80% CPU. It was because Virex was not compatible with Tiger.

If you have installed the application, you need to uninstall it.

Hope it helps.
 
Hi,

This happend after I upgraded. Killing the VSield (Virex) process did the trick. I did run top, I'm used that it sorts by cpu usage by default (*BSD top) so I did not find the proces.

I'm trying to uninstall Virex 7.5.1 but my .mac account prevents me from downloading the Virex DMG file which you need to uninstall as it sees that I'm running Tiger :D

Anyway many thanks!
 
Tiger and Virex are not compatible. Virex is no longer available at .Mac. You can get the uninstaller at MacAfee's (sp?) website.
 
I once had a hard time finding it because I thought it was MacAfee... I'm glad I don't need antiviral software on the Mac.
 
i experienced something similar as well. my powerbook Beachballs a lot after 428 (final), it was much faster on 425. and memory is used up almost 100% by simply running safari. what the hell is going on?? 10.4.1 can't come soon enough. not to mention the fact that Spotlight is far from the speed demonstrated in the videos. H.264 crawls and makes my PB look like a 4 year old dud.

Apple, please fix this. :(
 
I would imagine your problem is user fixable. What are 428 and 425? How did you install 10.4? Have you checked Activity Monitor/CPU usage.
 
i've been using Tiger since the pre-release editions and the last one that Apple decided to christen as final version is the 8A428. and yes i've been watching my activity monitor. most of the time, it never shows anything heavy running, except maybe for Safari that might hog up to 30-50% at a time - weird. but even at such uses, memory uses in 'top' in terminal shows almost 100% usage and my fan is blasting to no end. i also get a lot of beachballs.
 
The retail version of Tiger runs fine on my Powerbook. Perhaps something screwy occured when you did the update and a full install might cure it?
 
as far as i know, 428 IS final. so i think or hope that the system files are not the problem. i must confess that when i was installing this, it took me about 30 tries because my laptop never seems to like the disc and keeps spitting it out. it was only after i replicated the conditions when i installde 425 was i able to install it. and this condition is to have my laptop on battery power. no amount of PRAM zapping or start-up disc settings or pressing C for the the life of me can make my PB TAKE the damn disc.

you think there's something wrong with my machine hardware-wise?
 
I'm having this same problem. The "rogue" process seems to be something called "update." It's owner is root. It seems to take up the extra processing power that I'm not using, so it never totally gets in the way of other processes.

However, it presents a problem to have my processor running at 100% all the time because: a.) it gets too flippin hot and, more importantly, b.) it kills the amount of time I can get out of the battery.

Additionally, I've been having sporadic serious crashes. I think these may be do to virtual memory being used up and "thrashing," but I'm not sure. I seem to have problems especially with the Finder and with Open/Save dialogs in various programs, most notably Safari.
 
Yes, i also have the root "update" process problem.
In another thread i asked about it. Some say it's spotlight related but i don't think so anymore. Is there someone who really knows what the update process is?
 
'apropos update' tells me: "flush internal filesystem caches to disk frequently"

So that sounds to me like it _could_ be at least Spotlight related.
 
So this will return regularly? Because it does for more then a week now.
I have also re-installed Tiger on a fully nulled disk. Didn't help.
Then it's back to panther for me.
Can't have that when i'm performing live on stage. :(
 
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