High CPU usage without a process to blame. What is [migration/x]?

Solution 1:

I found the cause of the migration chaos.

A little while ago I was getting frustrated with gnome-do not staying alive. So I wrote this in my start up entries:

bash -c "while true; do gnome-do; done"

Turns out rather than running once that just keeps trying to spawn over and over and over again. I guess gnome-do forks out rather than blocks.

I found this by just going through every user process I have and nuking it. It wasn't using any CPU itself but it looked fishy.

You can't, the threads you are seeing are kernel threads responsible for moving threads between CPUs.

They are part of the Kernel scheduler and are not responsible for the pain you are having.

(I know that this not answer why you are having pain in the first place, more to that later.)