CPU Activity graph showing 8% usage while Linux inactice

It appears it was my cron tasks causing the issue. Although these only cause minor "blips" to the CPU usage and average CPU shown by 'iostat' is approx 1% the Linode Graph must be polling and catching the cron task cpu blip each time. I'm not sure if there's any way to avoid this?

@RichBB:

It appears it was my cron tasks causing the issue. Although these only cause minor "blips" to the CPU usage and average CPU shown by 'iostat' is approx 1% the Linode Graph must be polling and catching the cron task cpu blip each time. I'm not sure if there's any way to avoid this?

Would you please post the output of

crontab -l

The process names themselves are not particularly important if you want to obscure them for any reason, I really just want to see the timing. You might be able to shift the cron times forward or backward one minute and see what happens as a test.

James

I've been fiddling with the crontab entries to see if I could shift them but had no real effect.

Originally there were 3 entries:

*/1 * * * * cd /home…..

*/1 * * * * cd /home…..

*/3 * * * * cd /home…..

I think one of the differences I was seeing was the % scales. I believe iostat would be 0%-100% whereas from reading other posts the Graph appears to be 0%-400% for the 4 cpu's of the Linode.

After fiddling with my cron jobs my iostat average is now approx 0.6% and the Linode graph is showing approx 2.4% which would be correct if it's 0%-400%

Thanks for the suggestion.

The first two of your crontab entries are a bit pointless, * and */1 mean the same thing. Your third item will repeat every 3 minutes (20 times an hour).