I'm seeing similar disparity between top's total and per-process CPU usage as this question noted (http://superuser.com/questions/194936/disparity-between-tops-given-cpu-and-process-cpu-usage-total). However, in my case, I'm not running anything IO intensive, just typing into the LyX editor. The CPU graphs show half-minute periods of usage around 30%, but I cannot find individual processes much higher than 10%. Here's the output from top,
top - 00:37:39 up 3:24, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.16, 0.18
Tasks: 168 total, 2 running, 166 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 38.3%us, 7.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 50.7%id, 0.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 3.3%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 15.0%us, 5.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 79.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 14.0%us, 5.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 80.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 29.6%us, 5.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 64.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 12021M total, 1938M used, 10082M free, 122M buffers
Swap: 2053M total, 0M used, 2053M free, 954M cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1451 root 20 0 243m 146m 15m S 11 1.2 6:07.44 Xorg
2149 gatoatig 20 0 897m 52m 31m S 5 0.4 0:06.86 krunner
2094 gatoatig 20 0 643m 86m 48m S 4 0.7 1:56.03 kwin
2124 gatoatig 20 0 789m 69m 33m S 2 0.6 1:54.59 plasma-desktop
11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:10.77 kworker/0:1
5186 gatoatig 20 0 490m 40m 27m S 0 0.3 0:10.22 kopete
10662 gatoatig 20 0 482m 34m 19m S 0 0.3 0:00.67 konsole
11571 root 20 0 8716 1188 828 R 0 0.0 0:00.26 top
1 root 20 0 12460 816 668 S 0 0.0 0:00.87 init
My first thought was that it must be system load or SpiderOak, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There's been no network activity, an occasional disk write of a few-kilobyte file (to an encrypted partition), and my typing on the keyboard. /var/log/messages doesn't contain anything illuminating, and nothing around the time I was seeing the CPU usage.
My system is a pretty fast i5-2500 sandy bridge with 12 gb of ram; the hard drive and graphics card are older, though I doubt they are related. I'm running OpenSuSE 11.4 with kernel 2.6.37.6.
I'd appreciate any pointers to relatively easy ways I might be able to track it down.
