I'm running a fresh new install of CentOS 7 x64 w/ Cinnamon as my window manager. Occasionally I'm getting some major lag doing basic tasks, so I opened up an instance of top and it appears that the process polkitd (under user polkitd) is using a good bit of CPU.
It fluctuates from consistently 10% CPU to even as high as 70%, and I can't figure out what the process is all about, if it's necessary, and if not how can I stop it?
Thanks in advance for any advice you all may have!
I found out what was going on.
I had the applet 'Multi-core System Monitor' installed and added to one of my taskbars. It appears there's a bug in that code which causes polkitd to have a ton of CPU usage that steadily increases over time to unreasonable levels.
More info on applet causes continuously increasing memory usage
I've done a bit research and posted here https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1600161#c3
A workaround that I've been using is to remove /etc/xdg/autostart/org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Account.desktop until the above mentioned bug is fixed. The only function you will lose is the notification of expiring account password.
