Hello,

I have been getting notifications from linode about high cpu usage. My linode is mainly used for private project hosting, so it does not serve high traffic stuff.

The output of htop on my linode is

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
2477 root      20   0  2388   12   12 R  100  0.0   5878:53 /sbin/getty -8 38400 hvc0
2303 redis     20   0  3296  528  412 S    0  0.1  44:31.10 /usr/bin/redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf
28367 tdgs      20   0  2820 1116  868 R    0  0.2   0:00.12 top

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

What operating system and version are you using? What kernel are you using? (The commands head /etc/*release and uname -a will tell you the answers, respectively.)

You are right, my bad.

Here is the info you requested.

~$ head /etc/*release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS"

$ uname -a
Linux anacreon 3.4.2-linode44 #1 SMP Tue Jun 12 15:04:46 EDT 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux]

*BUMP*

Run

strace -f -p pid

replacing pid with the process ID of the getty process and post what the output is so we can see what it's doing.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

In addition to strace, have you tried just connecting to your Linode's console (through Lish) - e.g., the other end of that getty process - to see if anything interesting is going on? Maybe there's a ton of logging going on that you need to direct somewhere other than the console. Or maybe getty is stuck somehow trying to read input (so you don't even have a responsive login prompt), and just connecting and generating some characters would help flush it out.

If not, if you haven't already I'd probably also try restarting getty (I think "restart hvc0" would do it) to see if that helps.

-- David