Help, Fan Won't Stop Running

Hey all, a couple days ago I thought my laptop was plugged in while it was running, but it turned out to be disconnected.

Long story short, the battery completed died. Now ever since, the fan runs at full speed 100% of the time from the second I turn it on until it is shut down completely.

Please help this is really annoying!!

I don’t know if it is connected, but this sounds similar to an issue I have had with 16.04 from the beginning. The CPU temp goes through the roof and the fan goes ballistic whenever:

web browsing around 50% of the time. I can’t detect a pattern with particular websites.

using samba

randomly, for no reason at all that I can identify

For a while, the problem seemed to go away and so I assumed some of the updates fixed it. However, today, it has started again whenever I use Samba.

Step 1: identify the culprit.

Open the System Monitor (Applications -> System Tools -> MATE System Monitor)
In the “Processes” tab, sort the processes by CPU usage and note the 1st process.

If it’s gvfsd-smb it’s a know bug and there’s some workarounds you can find in this forum.
If it’s something else, please tell us what.
Cheers

it’s usually gvfsd-smb. The “workaround” of killing it is not really a workaround for me at all since it stops samba working and I need samba to work.

Sometimes it seems to be many instances of Chromium-browse open, even though i have closed chromium down

Sometimes, there does not seem to be any particular thing.

But, one other thing I notice is that sometimes when it happens, amongst my four cores, one of them is running at 100%. It will only do this for a few seconds, But, the 100% usage then jumps abruptly to another of the cores and so on. when this happens, the only solution is to log out and back in again. at which point the problem is temporarily dealt with.

Like I said, this was a major issue when I first installed 16.04. i struggled with it for a week or two and then went back to 14.04 (amongst other reasons). However, I have been holding 16.04 in a second partition and going in and updating/upgrading and having test runs with it. Around a couple of weeks ago, the fan and CPU issue seemed to settle down, though it was still running a bit hotter than 14.04 on average. However, today, it appears to have come back and gvfsd-smb seems to be the main culprit again

What make and model of computer? I ask because some have specialist fan control utilities.

This is really weird, but the problem randomly went away, but just for the record it’s a Lenovo Yoga 2 pro.

Also a lot of you were suggesting it was a rogue process, but that was not the case - my CPU and RAM were barely using anything at all. Just a very weird issue that was instigated by my battery dropping to 0%. Thanks for all the responses!

It could be a spurious/rogue interrupt:

host2@user1:/proc$ cat interrupts
           CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       CPU3       
  0:         44          0          0          0   IO-APIC   2-edge      timer
  1:          6       5783       1650       5174   IO-APIC   1-edge      i8042
  7:          1          0          0          0   IO-APIC   7-edge      parport0
  8:          0          0          0          1   IO-APIC   8-edge      rtc0
  9:          0          0          0          0   IO-APIC   9-fasteoi   acpi
 14:          0          0          0          0   IO-APIC  14-edge      pata_atiixp
 15:         38      90848      24580      77179   IO-APIC  15-edge      pata_atiixp
 16:        298         99     156524      97643   IO-APIC  16-fasteoi   ohci_hcd:usb3, ohci_hcd:usb4, snd_hda_intel
 17:        201  400227635         70        214   IO-APIC  17-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1

On my system, whatever is plugged into USB1 goes nuts occasionally.

1 Like

I found a temporary solution (until the developers can address it) on the Ubuntu forums. It seems that just about any distro based on the 16.04 kernel is having this problem, both with the fan going nuts and also with high memory usage at idle (Ubuntu Mint 16.04.x). Here’s what I found:

"I was having the same issue after upgrading to 16.04. What I did was
change the permissions on gvfsd-smb-browse so that it can only be
executed as sudo or by root. Now gvfsd-smb-browse doesn’t run on
startup. Below is how you can change the permissions in a Terminal:

sudo chmod 744 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-smb-browse

Not sure if it is a real solution to the underlying problem. But it does
resolve the cpu usage issue by not running gvfsd-smb-browse on
startup."

All you can do is give it a shot and see if it helps.