su with 100% cpu usage

Hi everybody, this is my first post on this forum. I hope I am doing everything right.

I have a FreeBSD server since a few years and access it via ssh. Everything was fine until recently where I noticed that my server was taking more time than usual for executing my commands. Then, when I tried to execute 'su' the command would not return and the shell was just stuck. I then executed 'top -P' and saw that the su-process was taking 100% of some cores of my cpu:

Screenshot 2023-08-09 at 13.53.20.png


Does anybody know what can possibly be the issue here and how to fix it ?

Best regards and thank you for your help
 
While in top(1), press 'a' to see the whole command line. It's likely some service that got started through su(1).
 
Thank you for the suggestion. When I press 'a', I see the details for the other processes. Only, the process related to 'su' does not display more information: the line stays exactly the same.
 
Can you kill the process? I don't know what happened but it looks like it's stuck in some infinite loop.
 
When I try to kill it it says "Operation not permitted". I was about to restart the server but thought I would ask in the forum first, maybe there is something that needs to be fixed.
 
Something's up, CPU 2 and 8 are pegged at 100% system too. CPU 8 is probably that stuck su(1) process (according to top) but something is hammering CPU 2 too. All the other cores aren't doing anything (100% idle).
 
you can use systat -vmstat to see what cause the high interrupts or vmstat -i
Thank you! I had to restart the server (through iLO, as I couldn't su into it) before I could run the commands. The issue seems fixed with the restart. I'll monitor it and check with these commands when it reappears. It showed me that I need to take backups more seriously ?.
 
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