X11 using up resources?

[Ryan Golhar]

I'm running RH WS v3, its up to date with patches.  Occassionally, I'll
have a few users logged in to it, some running VNC, maybe someone logged
in from the console.  

Every once in a while I'll notice the load average on the machine go up
to 8.xx to 12.xx.  When I run top to see what is running, I usually see
X taking up 99% of the CPU (see below).  

I can't figure out why.  The only thing I can think of is something with
someone's vnc session is causing this, but don't know what.  I've
resorted to rebooting the machine to fix it, but I've had to reboot the
machine several times now.  Has anyone seen this before or know where to
start looking for the cause?

----
 10:24:42  up 130 days, 21:37,  3 users,  load average: 6.04, 7.57, 8.30
68 processes: 63 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
           total    0.0%    0.0%  100.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%    0.0%
Mem:  1018892k av,  931928k used,   86964k free,       0k shrd,  129936k
buff
                    580664k actv,  120380k in_d,   13408k in_c
Swap: 2040244k av,   36896k used, 2003348k free                  571516k
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU
COMMAND
17170 root      22   0  7100 6716  1244 R    99.9  0.6   0:09   0 X
    1 root      15   0   468  468   416 S     0.0  0.0   0:04   0 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:02   0
keventd
    3 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 kapmd
    4 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00   0
ksoftirqd/0
    7 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0
bdflush
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   1:05   0 kswapd
    6 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:48   0 kscand
    8 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:02   0
kupdated
    9 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0
mdrecoveryd
   17 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0
scsi_eh_0
   18 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0
scsi_eh_1
   21 root      15   0     0    0     0 RW    0.0  0.0   0:20   0
kjournald

--
Ryan Golhar  -  golharam at umdnj.edu
The Informatics Institute of UMDNJ