What are these processes doing?

[Ken Teague]

Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> I don't understand.
> 
> Waiting properly and consuming a lot of CPU time are different things.
> Waiting processes should use no CPU at all, unless they are poorly coded
> and wait for something by periodically polling: "did it happen?" "did it
> happen?" "did it happen?"...
> --
> vda

I was very confusing to me as well.  I was thinking in the same lines as
you are now and couldn't imagine that a "waiting" process would consume
so much CPU time.

I did an strace -p on both processes the night before and got the same
results the following morning; just a single line of output with what I
quoted in my previous message.  I ran across this article:
  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=13782271

- Ken