Feeling Slow? Check the Load
Saturday, January 12, 2008, at 04:34AM
By Eric Richardson
My phone (an iPhone) has been feeling sluggish lately. It took until today for the light to turn on where I said "Why don't I open the terminal and check top?" Load was around 4, and it was instantly apparent the culprit:
12796 gnuchess 31.7% 7:12:55 2 31 109 1.36M 1.47M
12538 gnuchess 28.0% 6:46:13 2 30 109 1.36M 1.47M
12116 gnuchess 25.8% 7:02:24 2 30 109 1.36M 1.47M
Turns out that if the chess app crashed it was leaving a gnuchess instance running (and running hard, apparently) under the hood. A couple of those had built up and were choking out anything else trying to hit the CPU. A simple killall gnuchess and I'm feeling much better.