How to find and kill the creator of thousands of 'fuser' processes

[armware]

I am quite linux saavy, though this one eludes me. I'm hoping someone knows something I don't.

As the subject states, I am getting thousands of fuser processes. This ranges from 5k to 12k to 6k in a matter of 30 seconds. Suffice it to say, performance suffers. I cannot figure out where these bastards are coming from. How could I figure this out?

Here is some konsole output:

adam@lou# date; ps faux | grep fuser | wc -l
Wed Jan 11 23:11:29 CST 2012
5966

adam@lou# date; ps faux | grep fuser | wc -l
Wed Jan 11 23:11:34 CST 2012
12439

adam@lou# date; ps faux | grep fuser | wc -l
Wed Jan 11 23:11:48 CST 2012
7075

If I run "sudo killall fuser" this does clear them out, then they come right back. Is there a bug somewhere that I should report? I'm not sure what software is doing this, and anytime it happens - which is sporadic, though once it kicks in it keeps going until reboot - my laptop is damn near unresponsive. Even a logout/restart X doesn't kill them.

I appreciate any input, questions, guesses, anything. I'll play the diagnostic game.

[kubicle]

Re: How to find and kill the creator of thousands of 'fuser' processes

Do you have php5 installed?

If you do, the cause could be this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...p5/+bug/877894

[armware]

Re: How to find and kill the creator of thousands of 'fuser' processes

you totally nailed it. thank you! now i at least know what to kill when it kicks in.

i owe you a beer. if you're in the austin area, let me know.

[armware]

Re: How to find and kill the creator of thousands of 'fuser' processes

just for the record, should anyone else find this post here is what i did.
if this is not a great solution, feel free to explain.

i edited /etc/cron.d/php5 and commented out the only line that runs a cron:
#09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete


this will disable the cron job, which means no more thousands of fuser processes, though i may need to keep an eye on session files manually, which i am willing to do - it's a local web dev machine, there isn't that much going on anyways.

[kubicle]

Re: How to find and kill the creator of thousands of 'fuser' processes

you totally nailed it. thank you! now i at least know what to kill when it kicks in.

You could try modifying the cron job as suggested in the bug comments (/etc/cron.d/php5)

i owe you a beer. if you're in the austin area, let me know.

Ah, a beer ticket...I'll add a map pin for Austin

EDIT: Instead of disabling, you could remove the fuser parts of the command (see comment #5 on the bug report)