System sometimes is completely busy for several minutes

[tuxolero]

Hi,
Every few days, my PC is so busy that it is completely unusable for up to about 10 minutes.
During this time, the harddisk works constantly.
Even switching to a terminal or opening a konsole (for runing top) takes so long that the problem is over before I am there.

Once the problem occured, it comes back again and again until I reboot.
After reboot, everything is OK for 1 to 5 days.

But this time, I could check top.
It showed no process with more than a few percent CPU usage, but between 50% and 80%, sometimes nerly 90% waiting.
I recognized one of the processes with about 1% CPU usage. I hat problems with this one a few years ago:
kswapd0

Does anyone know if thre is a problem with this daemon again ?
Or can anybody give me a hint for a tool to identify which process is creating such a huge I/O load ?

Thanks and Regards,
Markus

[lmilano]

Re: System sometimes is completely busy for several minutes

Maybe a program is leaking memory, and it takes over all your RAM - then you would be using swap memory, which is excruciatingly slow.

You can type [ctrl]-[esc] and look at the processes in a GUI, and sort them by RAM, not CPU usage. You may see that one process is taking over a huge amount of RAM.

You may want to get familiar with this before next crisis.

Cheers!

[tuxolero]

Re: System sometimes is completely busy for several minutes

According to top, I still had nearly 1 GB of available RAM when the problem occured last time.