What's using all my CPU cycles

[stephenw10]

So here is where my basic BSD knowledege is badly letting me down.  :(

Today I logged into my box to check the logs and find that the CPU is running almost 100% all the time. This is up from 5% at most before 5.30pm today. I have only upgraded to 2.0.1 4 days ago and have been having some trouble with a package but anyway I fired up top -SH and:

[2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(4): top -SH
last pid: 28083;  load averages:  2.99,  2.83,  1.40                                                 up 0+00:05:22  23:30:31
116 processes: 5 running, 95 sleeping, 16 waiting
CPU: 40.4% user,  0.0% nice, 59.6% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
Mem: 86M Active, 18M Inact, 50M Wired, 1060K Cache, 46M Buf, 330M Free
Swap:

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
 3686 root      76    0 43356K 16348K piperd   0:08  4.98% php
 4445 root      76    0 44380K 19496K ppwait   0:08  3.96% php
 4146 root      76    0 44380K 20300K lockf    0:08  2.98% php
 3510 root      76    0 44380K 17980K piperd   0:08  1.95% php
    0 root     -16    0     0K    88K sched    1:59  0.00% {swapper}
   10 root     171 ki31     0K     8K RUN      0:24  0.00% idle
   11 root     -64    -     0K   128K WAIT     0:07  0.00% {irq14: ata0}
    4 root      -8    -     0K     8K -        0:02  0.00% g_down
 1571 root      44    0  6588K  4400K kqread   0:01  0.00% lighttpd
   11 root     -32    -     0K   128K WAIT     0:01  0.00% {swi4: clock}
   11 root     -24    -     0K   128K WAIT     0:00  0.00% {swi6: task queue}
   11 root     -68    -     0K   128K WAIT     0:00  0.00% {irq18: em0 ath0+}
23243 root      64   20 47452K 17184K nanslp   0:00  0.00% php
22313 root      64   20 47452K 17220K nanslp   0:00  0.00% php
32258 root      64   20 47452K 17220K nanslp   0:00  0.00% php
59818 root      64   20 47452K 17220K nanslp   0:00  0.00% php
 5983 root      64   20 47452K 17220K nanslp   0:00  0.00% php

ps aux doesn't show anything either. How do I find out what's using my CPU cycles?

Steve

[ericab]

check to make sure this isnt checked:

[stephenw10]

Thanks for the reply, that was my first thought also.
Checked it, polling is not enabled and never has been. Would be odd that it spontaneously started anyway.

Steve

[chpalmer]

Is it constant right now?

From a console-  Restart webconfigurator.

[stephenw10]

Ah, good suggestion but I have sorted it now.
I'm not sure it would have worked though since I twice restarted to whole box (you can see the gaps in the RRD graph) and that just made it worse!
It turns out I had left another computer on with multiple copies of the dashboard open that I had forgotten about. Interesting that the connection survived a reboot.
However would you not expect to be able to see the system load using top -SH?  :-
Is there some other tool I could use in future to diagnose something like this?

Steve