Fedora 11: high CPU utilization, logrotate
I had a problem with my Fedora 11 system suddenly shooting into 100% CPU
utilization. Looking at top, the culprit was a perl script, and tracing back
up the process tree its parent was logrotate. After some searching, it turned
out that the size of my /var/log/messages file had got way out of control –
5.5Gb. I thought the whole point of logrotate was to stop that sort of thing
happening. Anyhoo, removing /var/log/messages, and /var/cache/logrotate/*,
then kill -hup‘ing the wayward perl process has restored CPU sanity to my
system. I’ve added a size limit to /etc/logrotate.conf to try to ensure that
it doesn’t recur, though I’m still not quite sure how it got so bad in the
first place.