General Question about CPU Spikes

[newgeneral10]

I was looking at my system monitor graphs recently and I noticed I will have one core spike up to 100% for like half a second.  Then, maybe a minute later, another core will do the same thing.  Also, every time my cpu spikes, my network drops down to zero ( as I was downloading some random file).  However, once this download stopped, the spiking continued.  What makes it weirder is that it seems to happen on regular intervals.

 

I am not noticing any problems per se but I just noticed some oddities in my graph and wanted to know in a generic sense what could be going on.

 

If this matters, I am running a Dell Inspiron from like 2014 with an AMD A10 5745M APU.

[Jurrunio]

Background apps?

[newgeneral10]

On 10/4/2017 at 8:56 AM, Jurrunio said:

Background apps?

I was downloading the file in Chrome and that was the only tab, had KSysGuard open (System Monitor Graphs), and was taking notes in Vim on Yakuake (drop Down Terminal).

 

I am running Fedora Workstation 26 with KDE Plasma installed.

[GER_T4IGA]

Old AMD architectures have low IPC. I'd imagine pegging on of its cores to 100% would be relatively easy. Just a heads up!

[AncientNerd]

5 minutes ago, newgeneral10 said:

I was downloading the file in Chrome and that was the only tab, had KSysGuard open (System Monitor Graphs), and was taking notes in Vim on Yakuake (drop Down Terminal).

 

I am running Fedora Workstation 26 with KDE Plasma installed.

Any Linux implementation (or modern OS in general), has processes running doing work beyond what you have open and are aware of all the time, in general each one is low CPU overhead but together they can add up to a fair amount of usage especially on an old AMD processor, as @GER_T4IGA pointed out.

[newgeneral10]

On 10/4/2017 at 9:07 AM, AncientNerd said:

Any Linux implementation (or modern OS in general), has processes running doing work beyond what you have open and are aware of all the time, in general each one is low CPU overhead but together they can add up to a fair amount of usage especially on an old AMD processor, as @GER_T4IGA pointed out.

That makes sense.  But is there any way to spread them out so instead of pegging my CPU every five minutes or so, they run one at a time?

[AncientNerd]

6 minutes ago, newgeneral10 said:

That makes sense.  But is there any way to spread them out so instead of pegging my CPU every five minutes or so, they run one at a time?

There may be, basically you need to look at the schedule for these tasks - in older versions of Linux (the only ones I am familiar with) there were files you edited to configure how often some of these tasks ran and which ones ran. It took digging through the documentation and trying things out to find configuration that worked w/o having spikes. This was back in the early '00's so things have probably changed and you may have better tools now, but I would still suggest looking at documentation and doing some googling to see if there are any suggestions from anyone who has this specific version of Linux that can help with settings. Or someone on this site that has this version - since I am out of data on my Linux administration!

[newgeneral10]

On 10/4/2017 at 9:20 AM, AncientNerd said:

There may be, basically you need to look at the schedule for these tasks - in older versions of Linux (the only ones I am familiar with) there were files you edited to configure how often some of these tasks ran and which ones ran. It took digging through the documentation and trying things out to find configuration that worked w/o having spikes. This was back in the early '00's so things have probably changed and you may have better tools now, but I would still suggest looking at documentation and doing some googling to see if there are any suggestions from anyone who has this specific version of Linux that can help with settings. Or someone on this site that has this version - since I am out of data on my Linux administration!

Alright, I'll have to look into that!  Thanks!