Really strange issue here. I intermittently keep getting really unpleasant CPU spikes, where the CPU gets to 80-90% busy across all cores for about 5 minutes. When I look at conky, in htop or system monitor, and sort by % CPU, I can't see any process that accounts for this much CPU usage.
The only things I've changed since this started are:
- I moved to kernel version 2.6.35 (home compiled, up from 2.6.24-1)
- I installed the Nvidia driver 256.44 (up from 256.34)
Now, I am willing to downgrade either/both of those to find the problem but I'd prefer to do this as scientifically as possible and find out what is causing the CPU explosion before I downgrade.
Edit: My precise issue looks like a nvidia regression in their latest driver. Other people are getting similar spikes.
Best Answer
It might be a kernel thread, those are hidden by default in most performance monitors. In htop you can hide/show kernel threads with "K" (shift+k).