Macbook air: High User CPU %, but no corresponding process

Question

Something on my new Macbook Air 2011 is eating up the CPU and battery, with 30% User CPU in Activity Monitor, but there is no process listed with high CPU usage. Temperature is also very high. What could be happening?

Answer 1

Activity Monitor and sampling tools like top do cull processes that have terminated, so it's possible something is spawning lots of short lived processes.

Also, try changing the sample time to see if it's a rounding error. I have seen activity monitor lag RAM changes by 15 to 60 seconds so there could be measurement errors - especially with hyper threading on the new i5/i7 chipsets.

If you really want to dig into this, you might need to fire up Instruments from Xcode. Also, command tools like top, vm_stat, io_stat, and fs_usage.

The dtrace tools are powerful, but might be worse if you don't have long running processes or want to learn the syntax.

Answer 2

In Activity Monitor, switch to the "All Processes" instead of "My Processes" and see if there are any high-CPU-usage apps there.

Answer 3

In Activity monitor, there should be a drop-down menu that in your case probably says "My Processes." Click on that, and select "All Processes." This will show all of the running processes (sometimes, processes that you don't own are grouped under "User"). Alternatively, if the disk activity is high, you might want to try running iosnoop to figure out what your disk is doing that might cause such high disk activity.