Strange CPU activity

[IPNL]

I am a happy user of Ubuntu Budgie (currently 10.6.1) but recently I have been worried by some strange activity. I can detect it because the fan suddenly starts working, and when I look at the system monitor I see that cores of the CPU one after the other get 100% busy. However, in the Processes tab the sum of the numbers for CPU is far less than 100, nor do I have many programs open. I just wonder if the security has been compromised and something is running undetected.
PS In the meanwhile, I tried closing programs one after the other, and I noticed that Double Commander would not disappear from the list of active processes after closed, so I had to kill it from the System Monitor. After that, the spurious behaviour stopped.

 

[KGIII]

(currently 10.6.1)

I don't necessarily have an answer, but Ubuntu versions would be something like 20.04, 22.04, etc... Is that just the Budgie version? And, second, it's very unlikely that it's a security problem, It's far more likely that it's some program behaving poorly. It could be that 'double commander' was doing something like building an index of files to make searching more immediate, that sort of stuff.

 

[IPNL]

Thank you very much. The Ubuntu underneath is 22.04. I will be watching the DC and report to the author if necessary.

 

[osprey]

I am a happy user of Ubuntu Budgie (currently 10.6.1) but recently I have been worried by some strange activity. I can detect it because the fan suddenly starts working, and when I look at the system monitor I see that cores of the CPU one after the other get 100% busy. However, in the Processes tab the sum of the numbers for CPU is far less than 100, nor do I have many programs open. I just wonder if the security has been compromised and something is running undetected.
PS In the meanwhile, I tried closing programs one after the other, and I noticed that Double Commander would not disappear from the list of active processes after closed, so I had to kill it from the System Monitor. After that, the spurious behaviour stopped.

You can discover the percentages of CPU activity that programs use by running either of the programs: top, or htop. One way to do this is to open a terminal on your desktop running either of those programs, and have your other programs running simultaneously such that you can watch the "%CPU" column which will show who's the greater CPU user.

 

[Tolkem]

I noticed that Double Commander would not disappear from the list of active processes after closed, so I had to kill it from the System Monitor.

Looks like this is the one causing trouble. Monitor CPU behavior with and without double commander running, if the problem appears while it's running, and goes away when closed, then my bet is that something's wrong with it. Then, you could launch double commander from a terminal and look for any error messages, copy those and run a web search to see if someone else has experienced the same thing, in fact, you can do that just now, I just searched for "double commander 100% CPU usage" and got this:

Constant CPU usage, even when minimized - Double Commander

The solution there was

disable "Options"->"Layout"->"Show panel of operation in background"

Hope this helps!