A couple of quick questions

So earlier, I was playing some Tribes 2 ( a great game that is legally free to download and play now, btw), when I started to get MASSIVE frameloss. So, i exited the program and I noticed even GNOME seemed to be lagging (I had compiz turned off). When I went to check out the processor load using the "uptime" command, it said each one had an average load of over 1 ! I have no idea why that was happening, so I looked under "top" , but I couldn't see what was eating up all the processor time. Furthermore, I noticed that when I did "uptime", i got something similar to the following:


zorak@Chaac ~ $ uptime
23:10:38 up 17 min, 2 users, load average: 0.21, 0.15, 0.10

This seems a bit strange to me, seeing as how i have a _QUAD_CORE_ processor, and yet only 3 show up when I run "uptime". I tried checking my logs to see if there was a problem with my processor, but dmesg says the kernel detects my CPUs just fine. Anyone have any ideas what could be going on here?

Thanks.

-Zorak

Shouldn't uptime report the load on all 4 cores though? And also, I can understand frameloss due to a high amount of I/O operations to and from the disk, but I wasn't downloading anything or moving large files or anything of that nature. Furthermore, wouldn't that just stress ONE core (the disk won't write any faster if you have more cores reading/writing). Even then, i didn't think that accessing the disk would cause any core to have a load in excess of 1 on it.

As for swapping, that would only become necessary as the system runs up against the physical memory barrier, but I have 2GB of RAM, and I was only running tribes (and I haven't ever had it swap before while playing tribes). This is all a bit strange, but if I run into the problem again, I will be sure to follow your suggestions.

--Zorak

EDIT: Since I am a newbie when it comes to reading my logs, I am not sure where all the system keeps logs aside from /var/log/syslog*, is there anywhere else that I can look to see if the OS recorded a message of what was going on?

Question: How might I detect whether my machine has been compromised? I was watching a streaming video online and I assume that there was a problem with flash, because it made my entire system (almost) lock up. When I looked at 'uptime' it reported a load of 9! I decided to look in /var/log for any other indications of what might be the problem when I stumbled across the "auth.log" file. It turns out that there have been hundreds of attempts to log onto my machine every day for almost 6 months! Thank god they have all been invalid users, but it makes me wonder whether I have been compromised and what I can do to better protect myself.

I'd really appreciate your help.

-Zorak