gdm / gnome / gui processes consuming 100% cpu in RHEL 6

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4
  • gdm environment

Issue

  • GUI processes consuming high CPU

Resolution

No resolution has been found at this stage but the following are suggested workarounds:

  • Check the runlevel of the server, if it set as 5, it is better to set to 3 (recommended runlevel for servers) and thus avoiding graphical programs consuming more CPU, if graphical view for some application is needed, remote display tools can be used like VNC viewer.

  • Cgroup feature can be used which enables system adminstrators to divide tasks that run or will be run in groups, and allows limitations to be set or monitored. More details of cgroup on this link : Resource management and control groups in RHEL6

  • Priority of particular process can be set using renice . Renice command alters the scheduling priority of a running process.
    Nice value of the process can be seen in "ps -afl" and "top" under the "NI" column.

    # renice -n <11> -p <1145>
 11 - nice value, 1145 - pid

# renice -n -3 -u <user> 
- sets the priority of processes run by user account to -3

# nice -n 2 <command name> 
- will launch this process with the priority 2. 

nice command without any options, the default set priority is 10 :
# nice <command>

    NOTE : Lower numbers have greater priority; the minimum value is -20 and the maximum value is 19.

Root Cause

  • Unknown at this time

Diagnostic Steps

  • gdm-simple-greeter- Using 100% cpu.This utility is taking ~100% CPU as shown below:
# ps -ef | grep gdm 
38985 gdm       20   0  437m  15m  10m R 99.7  0.0  48225:36 gdm-simple-gree
  • Output from top shows gdm-simple-greeter taking high CPU.

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