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I'm running 13.04 on an acer c7 (chrubuntu 12.04 install then two system upgrades) and now whenever I use my computer for more than a few minutes, it slows down as polkitd, dbus-daemon, console-kit-daemon, and networkmanager chew up all my system resources. I tried googling this issue but it does not seem to be very widespread, or I'm just missing something.

I've tried looking at my system logs but nothing seems especially unusual there. I've also tried looking at the dbus-monitor. I'm not completely sure what I'm looking for there, but there does not seem to be a constant stream of activity. Is there some other way to see what polkitd and / or these other processes are going?

I would also appreciate any thoughts on how to fix this issue.

Thanks!

knute
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3 Answers3

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I had the same problem with high CPU usage after closing the lid on my Acer C710 Chromebook running chrUbuntu 13.04. On my system, dbus-monitor --system shows a swarm of NameOwnerChanged messages, about 30 per second. These repeatedly wake up everybody on the dbus, particularly polkitd, but also network manager, nm-applet, etc.

But DBus is only doing this because acpid keeps repeatedly running the /etc/acpid/lid.sh script. This, in turn, is due to an overactive ACPI interrupt line, exactly the same problem as on this question:

Why does kworker cpu usage get so high?

For my system, the problem was in /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe1F, and echoing "disable" to this interrupt immediately stopped the CPU usage. This results in a system that does exactly nothing when the lid is closed, but I can still "sudo pm-suspend" from the console, and opening the lid or pressing a keyboard wakes normally.

And more importantly, CPU usage is down to nearly zero!

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Orion Lawlor
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I've had the same symptom, in my case it was Nepomuk drowning dbus in a flood of activity. I imagine there are a million ways to create that same symptom, though.

dbus-monitor was a great place to start. Did you try dbus-monitor --system as well as dbus-monitor --session ?

You might snoop on those other high-CPU consumers with strace, see what they're opening/closing/sending.

Easy way to open strace for a process by name:

sudo strace -p$(ps -ef |grep console-kit-daemon |grep -v grep |awk '{print $2}')
Nate from Kalamazoo
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Pulled from: https://askubuntu.com/a/233947

I can't comment on another answer, but from the highest rated answer, it says to echo "disabled" into an interrupt in order to disable an overactive ACPI line. To find which interrupt, run this:

grep . -r /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/

Then, look for the answer with the high number. Echo disable into that file and you should be good to go.

The source link at the top has full info on how to make it persistent after suspend and reboot, but click his answer, I don't deserve any credit for that.

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surfrock66
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