CPU usage at 80-100%

[Alex Kohler]

I have recently built a FreeNAS box. This system is working fine and file transfers speeds etc are great. I am u sing the box for storing personal/customer data. It seems that every night from ~5am to ~8am my FreeNAS box is running something that is using 80-100% disk usage. my setup is 4x3TB WD RED + 2x2TB WD Green for a total of ~7.5TB. I am currently only using about 3.3TB of the available space. How can I get a list of running processes? How can I monitor running processes? Is this just some sort of system checking feature? Thank you in advance.

 

[L]

This is actually a very good place to use task manager. You can create a task that runs from 5-8 am and just have it run "top". Top shows the top running processes. By default it will want to write to the screen, so you can redirect that info into a file to read later. So for command top >> /mnt/poolname/dataset/file ... You want to write it out to somewhere in your pool, in case it gets big..

 

[Alex Kohler]

I am not sure what you mean.

 

[Alex Kohler]

nevermind I am apparently blind. I found the system process display, I will report back when I figure out what is using the CPU

 

[jgreco]

This is actually a very good place to use task manager. You can create a task that runs from 5-8 am and just have it run "top". Top shows the top running processes. By default it will want to write to the screen, so you can redirect that info into a file to read later. So for command top >> /mnt/poolname/dataset/file ... You want to write it out to somewhere in your pool, in case it gets big..

Historically, top run in a non-terminal environment runs in one-shot mode. This may not work out quite the way you're expecting if that is still the case.

 

[L]

Actually I tested with >> worked fine

 

[jgreco]

So ... what's it do for a termcap? I know the reason it ran in one-shot was so that it would be possible to have it do something vaguely useful in a scripted nonterminal environment, but it is only giving you a snapshot of the system over the period of a single second IIRC.

If it isn't running in one-shot mode, then it has to use ncurses or whatever to provide the screen updates; that seems bad.

Your previous message is vague on what exactly you think will happen; you make reference to "in case it gets big" which won't happen in one-shot mode, and wouldn't even be likely to be a problem in interactive mode over the period of three hours.

 

[L]

So... I used the tasks icon on 9.3. You have to turn off Redirect Stdout. I looked at the cron and saw that it was having to set $PATH, so I updated the command to run as

/usr/bin/top >> /mnt/kitty/logs/top --- kitty is the name of my pool, logs is a dataset i created and put a quota on, in case i forget to turn this off... top becomes a standard text file that can be read with anything that can read text.

I am running mine right now every minute, but I would run every 5 minutes or so, through the night to see if I can capture the process using all the resource.