Forums

CPU usage used with no processes running

So, for around 3 days now, I end up in the tarpit for no apparent reason. I stopped all tasks, always-on included, there are no running tasks.

Is there a way I can debug this situation and, hopefully, prevent it in the future?

The common scenario is that the CPU usage on your account is coming from Jupyter/IPython notebooks. They continue to run, even when you're not viewing them, and when they're idle they "sip" CPU power at a rate of about a second per minute. In the processes table at the bottom of the Consoles page they'll have names like "jupyter", "sudospawner", or "kernel". It can be a bit tricky to spot that they're using up the CPU because they do it by spawning a new process, which uses up about a second, then exits -- the parent process that's doing the spawning doesn't use up much CPU by doing that, and of course the processes that start then stop are very ephemeral, so you will probably not see them.

processes table at the bottom of the Consoles page

This would explain a lot, since I was looking at process table i Tasks tab. Killed some jupyter kernels should work like you said.

Maybe it would be a good idea to display all processes in a dedicated tab?

That's the plan.