Dozens of gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-autologin] processes

I have a non-server Ubuntu installation which I mainly use as a headless server. I don't remember what was the first version installed (there were several major upgrades) but right now I'm using the following:

Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS Release: 20.04 Codename: focal 

And I have dozens processes which look like this (from htop):

2167800 root 20 0 162M 7536 6756 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 ├─ gdm-autologin] 2167803 root 20 0 162M 7536 6756 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 │ ├─ gdm-autologin] 2167802 root 20 0 162M 7536 6756 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 │ └─ gdm-autologin] 

And if I try to count them:

ps aux | grep gdm-autologin | wc -l 237 

I suspect that it is not normal and if it is indeed not, what can I do about it? I don't know when they started to appear in masses because I started noticing those only after my interaction with apt (mostly updgrade) started giving me the following:

Failed to open connection to "system" message bus: The maximum number of active connections for UID 0 has been reached

and

Error connecting: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.LimitsExceeded: The maximum number of active connections for UID

Can these be connected?

UPD: Found another weird thing that I think is connected to all of this. Ran journalctl _UID=1000 and got 4116108 lines of logs since Feb 11. And it mainly contains the same Xorg log repeating over and over again: /var/log/Xorg.0.log

1 Answer

So I just came across this problem myself, as my machine was running at 100% all the time.

I find this a very dirty hack, but using the information in Gnome's "Configure automatic login" help, I found the file /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and turned off the autologin process by commenting out these lines:

AutomaticLoginEnable=True AutomaticLogin=username 

I then killed all the process, and my CPU has returned to normal.

The issue has not came back after restarting, and everything seems to be working as normal.