Need help tracking a process that's eating CPU

[nothsa]

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this process that's eating all available CPU, so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this:

According to 'top', the process is listed as:
27809 nobody 25 0 3632 2268 1916 R 81.9 0.4 169:23 0 perl

When I press "c" to show the command line, the process shows as:
27809 nobody 25 0 3632 2268 1916 R 84.1 0.4 174:13 0 [httpd]

As far as I can tell, this is a perl process that's being run by apache, but I have no idea beyond that. Can anyone shed some light on this, or let me know what I can do to track down the offending process/code/user?

[chirpy]

You should be able to get more information with:

ps axfwwwwwl

[sparek-3]

Try doing a:

cat /proc/27809/environ

That may give you some information

[nothsa]

- Unfortunately cat /proc/27809/environ produced nothing

- ps axfwwwwwl produced the following about the process:

F   UID   PID  PPID PRI  NI   VSZ  RSS WCHAN  STAT TTY        TIME COMMAND
1    99 27809     1  25   0  5712 2292 -      R    ?        240:22 [httpd]

This doesn't really tell me anything new. Does it explain anything else to you guys? Is there anything else that I can try?

[brianoz]

Try cat /proc/27809/cmdline and ls -l /proc/27809/cwd (second tells you the working directory).

Then try lsof -p 27809 which will tell you the script it is running, and any other files it has open.