[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#639539: top problem

[Rob Donovan]

has happened again :

top - 22:49:30 up 7 days,  7:38,  3 users,  load average: 1.19, 0.88, 0.80
Tasks: 212 total,   3 running, 209 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  1.5%sy, 92.7%ni,  5.9%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  
0.0%st
Mem:  16461424k total, 11328664k used,  5132760k free,   484068k buffers
Swap: 35150104k total,        0k used, 35150104k free,  8270712k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 5178 user       20   0 19180 1436 1004 R    0  0.0   0:00.19 top
 3431 user       20   0 79296 1904  944 S    0  0.0   1:53.73 sshd
 3432 user       20   0 21720 4592 1620 S    0  0.0   0:00.17 bash
 3474 user       20   0  186m  26m  12m S    0  0.2   5:26.99 emacs
 3478 user       20   0 26104  928  624 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 dbus-launch
 3479 user       20   0 23260  824  580 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 dbus-daemon
 3481 user       20   0 46008 5548 2316 S    0  0.0   0:00.44 gconfd-2
 3482 user       39  19 1844m 1.6g  932 S    0 10.1  2590446h my_prog.x
 3488 user       20   0 79316 2044  960 S    0  0.0   0:02.31 sshd
 3489 user       20   0 21764 4640 1620 S    0  0.0   0:00.60 bash
16039 user       20   0 78988 1724  956 S    0  0.0   0:00.12 sshd
16216 user       20   0 21720 4612 1632 S    0  0.0   0:00.36 bash

This is just processes owned by me (userid changed to user).  The 
program that is eating all the CPU is my_prog.x, which is running nice 
19.  It's been running for about 67 hours now, not 2590446 hours.  The 
92% nice CPU usage (up the top) is credible, while 0% is not.  1844m 
memory usage is correct.  The program is logging to stdout at the usual 
rate.  Load average should be about 7.8.  CPU usage for my_prog should 
be about 760% +.