So, yesterday evening I restarted the server after having installed a couple of updates. I guess it needed it after a couple months' uptime, my crapped-up Leopard Server probably isn't as neat as a decently configured BSD box (shame on me, but I believed this "Server up and running in 15 minutes, without an IT department" had more truth to it than it actually does -- perhaps that has something to do with me running a Mini G4 for the server, with a broken internal ethernet no less). Things didn't look right when I checked it this morning - neither the USB ethernet (the one made for MacBook Air), nor AirPort would connect, and kernel_task was taking ~40% CPU, along with everything else helping to bring CPU usage to 100%. A few PRAM resets later, AP finally finds my network, kernel_task calms down, and ethernet is still offline.
Now, looking at activity monitor, "User" CPU usage stays at 100%, but no individual process is above 5%, and only 5 are consistently above 1%, a few at 0.1-0.9%, and most say 0.0%. Why would Activity Monitor say 100% CPU is being used by user (every now and then giving 1-2% to system), when I could barely hit 20% adding together what each process uses?
