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.