In my recent experience with virtually hosted web servers, I ran into a problem where mingetty was taking a large amount of CPU usage. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Thanks to this post, I have finally figured it out.

Mingetty, is defined as: “a minimal getty for use on virtual consoles. Unlike agetty(8), mingetty is not suitable for serial lines. I recommend using mgetty(8) for this purpose.”

According to this post, it’s usually a utmp log issue and can sometimes be cleaned up by clearing the tmp file. You do this by:

mv /var/run/utmp /var/run/utmp.BAK
touch /var/run/utmp

I continued to have the issue, so I had to go a few steps further. I had to get rid of the tty’s. What tty’s? These tty’s:

mv /etc/event.d/tty1 ~/tty1.bak
mv /etc/event.d/tty2 ~/tty2.bak
mv /etc/event.d/tty3 ~/tty3.bak
mv /etc/event.d/tty4 ~/tty4.bak
mv /etc/event.d/tty5 ~/tty5.bak
mv /etc/event.d/tty6 ~/tty6.bak

This will move those tty’s to your home folder so that you don’t lose them permanently. I got this tip from the bug report, found here.