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Recently I have a problem with my CPU. Without opening any other program, a CPU starts working harder than normal.

Reference

Characteristics:

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MarianD
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Brian Maxi
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  • Why do you believe this is a problem? – Nmath Mar 19 '21 at 02:21
  • @Nmath glad you asked :) While it may have only cursory relevance to this question here, I'd like to offer my general concern about such scenarios: https://superuser.com/questions/1626879/extra-wear-of-multicore-processor-when-only-a-single-core-is-used-is-there-such – Levente Apr 04 '21 at 21:22

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For first, why only one core:

I'm not the best authority to answer that; this site has tons of people who understand that better, yet they stayed away from answering for so long; so it's my turn then :)

To my understanding, it boils down to how a specific program was written. Before multicore processors came into fashion, all programs used a single core. When multicore processors appeared, people started to update/improve software so that their programs would be aware of multiple cores and they could distribute their load over them. The primary goal I guess was to achieve better performance, shorter times for computations.

But there is still a notable amount of software out there that uses only a single core. The creators of those software did not prioritize to make them multicore-aware. Maybe they feel quicker computations are not mission-critical for their program. Maybe they just don't have the capacity to work on this aspect. Maybe the program is so small, that it's not deemed worthy for bringing in the heavy artillery of a multicore-compatible framework.

So this is kind of normal, even if it may appear inconvenient for the user in some cases.

Second, which program is it?

Your top screenshot with the graph shows that you used the System monitor app to explore your issue.

In this app's top window header, right above the graph in your screenshot is a row of buttons: Processes, Resources, File Systems.

Pick the Processes button to see a list of all the processes currently running. Click on the % CPU table header to order the items by the highest value in this column. Likely, the process responsible for the activity will stand out sharply from the rest, on the top.

After having the name of the process, you can search the net for its name, maybe combined with the term "Ubuntu". If that does not serve with sufficient clues, you can bring a new, specific question here, like this one or this one.

Levente
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