Odd freezing up and high CPU usage reported

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Odd freezing up and high CPU usage reported

Occasionally, my system will become unstable and freeze up. Finder normally causes the problem and there is the spinning rainbow wheel of death. On a similar note, activity monitor reports 55% system CPU usage, when there is nothing listed that is using that much CPU, and, when this happens I am unable to shutdown, unless I hold down the power key. Any suggestions?

MacBook Pro 7,1, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Sep 22, 2010 8:27 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 22, 2010 9:02 AM in response to Twr2600

Twr2600 wrote:
activity monitor reports 55% system CPU usage, when there is nothing listed that is using that much CPU

Welcome to Apple's discussion groups.

In Activity Monitor set the list near the top of the window to "All Processes", then click on the "% CPU" heading so that the highest CPU users are at the top. This should enable you to see what's consuming all that CPU time.

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Answer 2

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 22, 2010 9:12 AM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

That's what I usually have it on, all processes, and even the command top does not see the process Which is using the CPU, so when activity monitor is set to see all processes, it does not see the process that makes
my laptop hot

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Answer 3

Sep 22, 2010 10:19 AM in response to Twr2600

Twr2600 wrote:
even the command top does not see the process Which is using the CPU

I could imagine a situation where rogue software is masking itself from the top command and from Activity Monitor, but I believe that would be extremely unlikely. It's more likely that your 55% CPU usage is spread across several processes. What value do you compute if you add the % CPU of the top 10 processes on your Mac?

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Answer 4

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 22, 2010 1:26 PM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

It's below 10%, the 55% is reported under system, when the entire system begins to freeze up, finder doesn't work, but this especially happens with a USB drive, and i have reinstalled several times, used different USB drives, and it happens randomly, but it seems like something doesn't want to let the USB drive go, it either freezes up, or reports that an application is still using it. But, hard shutdowns sometimes screw up the computer anyway, im not sure what to do.

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Answer 5

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 22, 2010 1:29 PM in response to Twr2600

I should also add, that i did an extended hardware test, and there were no errors found.

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Answer 6

Sep 22, 2010 2:17 PM in response to Twr2600

Twr2600 wrote:
the 55% is reported under system

Launch the Console utility and see if there are a lot of logged messages during times that your system is slow. It may be that OS X is slowing down your Mac by frantically logging some sort of error condition.

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Answer 7

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 23, 2010 3:23 PM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

There's 4000 messages from the past day, is this normal? A lot of them have to do with google chrome, not sure which section i should be looking at.

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Answer 8

Sep 23, 2010 5:47 PM in response to Twr2600

Twr2600 wrote:
There's 4000 messages from the past day, is this normal?

My Mac shows 4000 messages from a four-day period, so your count seems a little high.

not sure which section i should be looking at.

If your Mac is having problems with system processes, I'd concentrate on the messages in FILES -> system.log.

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Answer 9

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 27, 2010 6:40 AM in response to William-Boyd-Jr

Mostly the output is from errors from google chrome, really meaningless. My system froze 2 times in the past 15 minutes, and i was using a USB drive, brand new. I have had issues with 3 USB drives overall, and what happens is that the system uses 55% CPU on an unregistered single core process, so it uses 100% of one core and the rest spills over to the other core. It is apparently a system process, no records of any issues in console... But when i killall Finder and attempt a manual reboot now command, it's stuck on the blue screen, and I would need to do a hard shutdown by holding down the power key in order to be able to use my computer. Sometimes it freaks out when i am copying something on the disk as well, BUT my entire system passes the Apple Hardware extended test, so i'm confused as to what my next option is to do. Reinstalls tend to be annoying and the problem presents itself even after reinstalling, and using different USB drives, and repartitioning the USB drives. This is all pointing to a software driver bug, or finder just *****

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Answer 10

Sep 27, 2010 5:15 PM in response to Twr2600

Twr2600 wrote:
Mostly the output is from errors from google chrome, really meaningless.

This may not do anything useful, but you might try uninstalling Chrome and all its component software. You could leave any Chrome remnants within your user folder to make it easier to restore Chrome later.

My system froze 2 times in the past 15 minutes, and i was using a USB drive, brand new.

Do you experience any problems if you have no USB devices attached?

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Answer 11

Sep 27, 2010 6:27 PM in response to Twr2600

I am having the same issues and ran verify and repair disk permissions in the utility. To no avail.

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Answer 12

Twr2600 Author

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Sep 28, 2010 8:20 PM in response to sittingbl

Only after hard resets do I experience the problem *sometimes* but the USB drive problem triggers the whole
51% CPU usage from system, top and system monitor do not report the process. But finder
Is not responsive In terms of ending the file transfer. But there is no activity to the USB drive and any attempt to unmount is using umount just umount waits, no feedback given. It's an interesting problem
For sure. Running PGP though, is the other user running
PGP as well?

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