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neophilia · Nov 30, 2002, 12:40 PM

I am truly pondering chucking my whole system out the window.

About 2 weeks ago, I started noticing my CPU Monitor spiking like nuts after about 10 minutes from startup time. Process viewer revealed a CPU hogging Window Manager..spiking from 60% to 120%..idle system. I think I saw it hit 800% once. What was even more worrying: I kept seeing random garbage process pop up and disappear.

So I took the plunge, wiped the drive completely and reinstalled..Yesterday, after having tweaked things just right again, it started doing it again. Not so bad now, consistently hitting the 80s, but it still drags the whole system down. Random garbled processes are there again as well, all with user "???".

The only possibilities I could think of are 1) this damned thing is possessed, or 2) the ACard drivers I recently installed did something to the whole system. I went with 2, reinstalled the old drivers and even unplugged the card entirely..problem remains.

Should I call a priest? System is a dual 533, 1.12Gb RAM, under a year old Seagate Barracuda 80gig, stock GeForce 2MX and ATI Radeon 7000..

Any help is GREATLY appreciated.
-peter

ambush · Nov 30, 2002, 01:35 PM

What OS are you running?

neophilia · Nov 30, 2002, 02:00 PM

Originally posted by ambush:
What OS are you running?

Oh whoops, 10.2.2.
-peter

kupan787 · Nov 30, 2002, 03:04 PM

Originally posted by neophilia:
So I took the plunge, wiped the drive completely and reinstalled..Yesterday, after having tweaked things just right again, it started doing it again. Not so bad now, consistently hitting the 80s, but it still drags the whole system down. Random garbled processes are there again as well, all with user "???".

I know you probably don't want to do it again, but if you do a reinstall again, but this time don't install all your extras, how does it run? If you let it sit on just a clean OS X insall, does it start doing the window manager thing? If not, then start adding your stuff back one by one, letting the machine restart and sit for a few minutes. If all seems ok, repeat until the wndow manager starts acting up again. Tthen at that point you have found the culprit.

neophilia · Dec 3, 2002, 06:40 PM

Originally posted by kupan787:

I know you probably don't want to do it again, but if you do a reinstall again, but this time don't install all your extras, how does it run? If you let it sit on just a clean OS X insall, does it start doing the window manager thing? If not, then start adding your stuff back one by one, letting the machine restart and sit for a few minutes. If all seems ok, repeat until the wndow manager starts acting up again. Tthen at that point you have found the culprit.

I basically did this with the last clean install and I thought I found the problem.. the new ACard IDE drivers. But then I wiped those and replaced with original 10.2.2 versions and the problem persists. Actually, right now Window Manager is hogging an average of 90-110% of the the system CPU.. It gets more and more the longer the machine is on.

Is there a way to reset the kernel extensions? I see a weird message if I login as single user that looks like it's still looking for the PCI IDE card I pulled.. Tried resetting PRAM, tried holding down the hardware reset switch (on the mobo) for a while.. no go..

Could this be an ATI/nVidia thing? I got a few kernel panics weeks ago due to my having over a gig of RAM, so I pulled one 512 chip and the problem was gone. About a week later, put the RAM back in on a whim and the problem simply disappeared.

I swear, this thing is possessed.
-peter

ReggieX · Dec 3, 2002, 07:16 PM

Quit all applications except the Terminal. Enter the following using your administrator password when asked:
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

And immediately reboot.

Dunno if it'll help.

neophilia · Dec 3, 2002, 09:02 PM

Originally posted by ReggieX:
Quit all applications except the Terminal. Enter the following using your administrator password when asked:
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

And immediately reboot.

Dunno if it'll help.

Update: did a search of the forums and found someone claiming shadowDisk as a possible culprit..sure enough, killing that seemed to solve the Window Manager freaking out problem. But then something even weirder happened (again) which this time I managed to get a screen grab of:

See!? Possessed!

Seriously, what the hell could that be? I've since tried deleting that kernel extension cache and restarting and have yet to see the ghost process pop up...yet.
-peter

stupidFish23 · Dec 4, 2002, 02:18 AM

hi, i am the developer of shadowDisk, and read your post here. could you please tell me your exact system stats, what other apps you were running, so I can help track down the problem?

thanks.

neophilia · Dec 4, 2002, 02:38 AM

Originally posted by stupidFish23:
hi, i am the developer of shadowDisk, and read your post here. could you please tell me your exact system stats, what other apps you were running, so I can help track down the problem?

thanks.

Email on the way.
-peter

Phoenix1701 · Dec 4, 2002, 03:09 AM

I don't know if I was the other person you mentioned claiming shadowDisk as the culprit, but yes, I was having exactly the same issues as you were, *including* the nonsense processes (I caught that in a screenshot as well)... they may be entirely unrelated issues, and we just noticed the weird processes because we were staring at Process Viewer so much.

But yes, the 100+% Window Manager CPU usage definitely went away when I stopped using shadowDisk, and hasn't come back since, and I haven't noticed any funnily-named processes since then either. But YMMV.

stupidFish23 · Dec 4, 2002, 03:15 AM

Phoenix1701:

do you have a dual processor mac?

neophilia · Dec 4, 2002, 10:54 AM

One thing I forgot to mention regarding shadowDisk: I was running it in "faceless" mode, with the Dock icon hidden. Not sure if that could be the root of the problem, but it sounds like it might.. No time to test regular mode right now (finals! ugh!).
-peter

Phoenix1701 · Dec 4, 2002, 05:50 PM

Originally posted by stupidFish23:
Phoenix1701:

do you have a dual processor mac?

Yes, I do, and I too was running shadowDisk in faceless mode.

stupidFish23 · Dec 4, 2002, 05:57 PM

okay, so I really don't know what might be causing this, but it surely isn't the facelessMode, as I have other app out that use FacelessMode as well, but no such complaints ever reached me. from what I found out is that this problem only appears in dual processor macs, but I don't have the slightest idea why. I am investigating this problem.

if anyone has the same problem on single processor mac, please notify me.

Ben