High processor usage by Java process

  • 7010470
  • 17-Jul-2012
  • 07-Aug-2012

Environment

NetIQ Sentinel 7.0.1 Sentinel Server

Situation

The processor usage on the Sentinel server is staying at or near 100% usage.  In most cases it is the java process that is causing most of the usage.

Resolution

run the following command on the Sentinel server
 
sudo date -s "`date`"

Cause

On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July (2012), the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.

Many computing systems use what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it.