Massive CPU utilization on Ubuntu

Curmudgeon · #4 (**permalink**) May 19th, 2009

I've been having this problem as well (it happens when I try to browse a host with a large number of files), and I think I've tracked it down to a memory allocation issue. What seems to be happening is that the default initial heap allocation for limewire is too small, causing the system to go into a frenzy of garbage collection when the number of files is too big, which causes the spike in CPU load that you see.

What I did to fix this (as best as possible) was to change the invocation line towards the end of the "runLime.sh" script to the following, which explicitly specifies larger heap allocations:

${JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR}java -ea -Xms1024m -Xmx1700m .....

The first value (-Xms...) specifies the heap allocation at startup; the second (-Xmx...) specifies the maximum heap allocation. You may have to play with these numbers to find ones that work well for you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanohead

I've had various version of LW on Ubunutu for the past few years, and very frequently, CPU utilization spikes and stays there. In the system monitor utility, its Java thats consuming all the CPU (limewire is frequently shown as sleeping ??).

This behavior has been consistent through the past 5 or so versions of all these pieces of software. Sometimes, I just launch LW, and its doing nothing, and it just starts slamming the CPU. Even more painful, is on the dual core I run now, the linux scheduler gets into the game and the round robin CPU utilization makes the system nearly hang as workload is swapped from one core to another. Its been happening for years, and each time I upgade, I hope it won't happen again. But alas....

I'm currently running Hardy (8.04), with Java 1.6.06. and LW 4.17.9 pro.