Issue
I am running Debian Linux 9 (Stretch) with a 4.9 kernel, and I notice periodically the system launches an apt-config process with user _apt that uses 100% CPU and consumes enough resources that I can't mount or unmount volumes, much less use desktop functions (in my case KDE Plasma).
I thought this might be due to the installation of the unattended-upgrades package that is now installed by default as described on the Debian wiki, but following the procedure to disable with the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades did not help.
I see no similar resource consumption issues when I open a console and use aptitude or dselect, or if I use Discover, even though these programs will also open an apt-config process with user _apt that uses 100% CPU.
How should I approach this problem?
Solution
This is debian bug #881787. Packagekit is checking for updates every 5-10 minutes on a Stretch KDE system. You can see this in systemctl status packagekit.
The packagekit logs also show how long the checks take. On my system they took over 500 seconds and so were running basically constantly.
The apper package may be responsible.
I had this package installed. I uninstalled it and have now successfully gone a whole 30 minutes without any new entries appearing in the packagekit logs. So that solved it for me!
Answered By - mappu Answer Checked By - David Marino (WPSolving Volunteer)