CentOS 6: /usr/sbin/qpidd eating up all CPU (at 100%)

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Mattias Geniar, July 02, 2012

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If you’re running CentOS 6 you may suddenly find your ‘/usr/sbin/qpidd’ processes running at 20-100% CPU causing extra load. In a top, it would look like this.

PID USER      PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S CPU% MEM%   TIME+  Command
 1316 qpidd      20   0  303M  2764  1580 S 28.0  0.6 10h58:34 /usr/sbin/qpidd --data-dir /var/lib/qpidd --daemon
 1315 qpidd      20   0  303M  2764  1580 S 27.0  0.6 10h58:34 /usr/sbin/qpidd --data-dir /var/lib/qpidd --daemon
 6494 root       20   0  110M  2412  1280 R  1.0  0.5  0:00.68 htop

This is caused by the Leap Second bug that has bitten quite a few servers/services hard, including nearly all Java daemons.

The fix is as follows.

$ /etc/init.d/ntpd stop
$ date -s "`date`"
$ /etc/init.d/ntpd start

The qpidd itself does not have to be restarted, simply stopping ntpd, setting the date manually and starting ntpd again fixes the problem.