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Exactly what are these services / programs. Apparently they make my system almost useless. Any one of them at point of time uses at least 50% CPU and continuous access to HDD.

I'm not exactly sure what exactly caused these to start. But here are few things I've done (right before I noticed laptop being unuseful):

Starting Gwibber services for twitter. Installing mbrola (speech synthesis) Installing gespeaker (downloaded from net its not available in repos).

And I think all these services starts when I start any google page (gmail, google+ etc.) -- maybe related to google talk plugin?

I'm gonna try not opening one of these pages (not sure for how long though) Thanks

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This are kernel processes. kswapd is basically responsible for the swap space management. If it gets busy that's usually a sign that you are low on RAM. Quite likely it causes the HD activity, which in turn keeps kworker and ksoftirqd busy.

See Kworker, what is it and why is it hogging so much CPU? and Why is ksoftirqd/0 process using all my cpu? for an explanation about those processes.

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  • nice thank you, now that I read those articles I have started believing that its google talk plugin as when I do top I can see bunch of those requests. To fix my webcam issue in gmail/google+ I,m trying out few suggestions around the web. I would like to make sure the issue for overload but I dunno what is syscall profiling tools and how to use it, If u can point me to one such tool I'll learn to use it.
    – wisemonkey
    Oct 30, 2011 at 0:23
  • yes it was google talk plugin, purged now everything is working good. Though haven't used syscall profiling, I guess oprofile or systemtap are 2 apps to do that?
    – wisemonkey
    Oct 31, 2011 at 17:58
  • Yes, if you are not low on memory ans you can't find the guilty process by killing some suspects these tools can help. But you need some good understanding about system internals to use them.
    – Florian Diesch
    Nov 3, 2011 at 16:35
  • Guess I lack in understanding internals, I'll just be happy with getting it back to working :) Thanks (I've pretty good amount of memory, I may try those apps in future)
    – wisemonkey
    Nov 3, 2011 at 17:45

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