Something strange happens when Top is`nt closed with "ctrl c" on our new box. If I for example close the shell session without first stopping Top, the program starts utililizing all available cpu resources until killed manually.

Is this normal behavior? Does this have anything to do with the specific program Top or is there something more fundamentally wrong here?

I have never seen this happen on other servers.

The server runs Red Hat 7.1.

A lot of processes will do this if not shutdown properly. Why would you just shut your session without logging off?

Let`s say the connection between my computer and the server went down for a short period of time, or if my computer crashed...

This might happen, and it would`nt be nice if the server was affected by this....

If this is normal I will just have to be aware of the issue, I just have`nt seen it happen on for example Cobalts...

If this is a big concern , just write a cron script that will close run away processes after a period of time.

I think Softerweb just wants to know if it is normal or not.

Yes percent5, exactly. If it is normal, then everything is fine, we will have to be a little more careful. If it is not normal we have to figure out the problem before we place any clients on the server.

Thank you all for your replies, by the way.

Well, I've had "top" do exactly as you've described. Accidently closed the SSH window without ending the top process and logging out... come back to find out the server load it at "1" instead of ".15" etc.