CentOS5 guest consumes 40% CPU while idling

I just upgraded to build 5608 unders Mac OSX Leopard (MacBook Pro 2.6GHz Core2Duo with 4gigs RAM). I reinstalled Parallel Tools after upgrade.

Regarding to OSX Activity Monitor my CentOS5 (RHEL5 clone) guest installation (768M RAM) is now consuming minimum 40% of CPU while idling. I do not remember it doing this before the update. My Windows guest consumes <10% whiled idling. Inside the linux guest prluserd is consuming about 13% of CPU (see screenshot of top command output attached).

Anyone else experiencing similiar issues?

 

Experiencing Same Problem

I am running build 5608 on an 17" MBP 2.6GHz with 4GB RAM, and OS X 10.5.4. I have installed CentOS5 and I can confirm that my CPUs are consuming close to 40% just by running a stripped down version of CentOS5.

 

Did you installed tools or using still old tools version?

 

Now, this is strange: I was 100% sure that I had installed the new version of Parallels Tools. But when I type prluserd -V I get as the version 3.0.5581.

So I tried the installation again: got Parallels Tools mounted under /media and ran the parallels-tools.run script as root. I checked from tools-version file that the version was 3.0.5608. The script reports that my X.org version is 7.1.1 and that tools got installed.

But what happens after I restart X? My version is still reported being 3.0.5581 by prluserd...

So the Tools installation fails for some reason? I also tried disabling SElinux and running the installation again, but that did not help either.

Any ideas how I could debug this more?

 

Try to uninstall old tools first, and install new version

 

I tried that also and it made no difference.

 

I double checked and tried uninstalling again:

I disabled selinux, uninstallation went ok, I restarted X and after logging in I found that prluserd was not running anymore. But prluserd executable can be still found from /usr/bin, is this normal? Also /usr/lib/parallels/prluserd exists.

I ran the installation script again and after X restart I once again saw that nothing had changed, still no new version in use.

 

Yes, pluserd version used is correct
what is on the CentOS side in top?

 

In CentOS top can be seen same things as in the screenshot included in my first post: about 95% of CPU is idle having as the highest consumers XOrg taking 1.0% and prluserd 0.7%. In OSX Activity Monitor CentOS Parallels consumes 35-39% of CPU while WinXP Parallels that is also running consumes only 11-16% of CPU while idling.

This is a vanilla CentOS5 installation, no custom configs, just all the recent updates enabled. Can you recreate this behaviour with your own Parallels installations?

 

Actually I have RHEL 5, and CentOS 4.6 and there is no high CPU usage, are you using Screen Sharing in mac OS or VNC server

 

I am not running VNC server and Screen Sharing is not enabled.

Are RHEL5 and CentOS5 100% identical? Should I try installing some other Linux and see how it performs?

 

I am not sure about 100% compatibility, but CentOS it is recompiled RHEL, you can try of course others, but when I run Windows 2003 load is higher usually then Linux distros

 

I did "telinit 3" and shut down prluserd. I still have 28% CPU usage in OSX for Parallels.

What I see in top in Parallels under CPU usage is 35% usage for "si". Only 65% is "idle".

That high "si" means high CPU load for interrupts? Anything I can do about it?

 

si -- Software Interrupts
The amount of time the CPU has been servicing software interrupts.

 

Whats causing the high level of software interrupts in CentOS5 under Parallels, any idea?

Is it causing the high CPU utilization in OSX for Parallels OSX? If, is there anything I can do about it?

 

Depends on your installation, as you described you shutdown pluserd, so you need to check what is causing high CPU usage in top, Parallels Tools are not in there

 

I shut down ntpd in the Parallels CentOS5 and that made the CPU consumption for software interrupts go away. Now the CPU of CentOS is 99% idle regarding to top. But still in OSX Parallels consumes 25% of CPU.

Starting prluserd at runlevel 3 makes prluserd consume 41% of CPU in CentOS and Parallels in OSX consumes 57% of CPU.

 

Strange, try to use fseventer to see where it is going http://www.freemacware.com/fseventer

 

I also have noticed a high CPU usage when Parallels is running CentOS 5. It uses around 40% when active. This dropped to around 30% when I stopped prlusred. But what may be more interesting is that Parallels consumes around 3% when I suspend the VM. I have run fseventer and there is not enough file activity from Parallels to justify this amount of CPU usage. In fact, Parallels do seem to update any files over a 1 minute period.

 

Double click in Activity monitor on process, and provide sample for process, will try to check also