Alan McKinnon wrote:
Apparently, though unproven, at 22:18 on Wednesday 10 November 2010, Dale did
opine thusly:
Dale wrote:
According to top, gkrellm and cat /proc/meminfo there is no swap in
use. I have 2Gbs of ram and have swappiness set to 20 or 30. I
rarely use swap unless I am compiling something huge, OOo comes to
mind, or have a LOT of images open with GIMP.
I did check to make sure tho. My swappiness did get magically changed
once before. I wish it was something that easy tho.
Still open to ideas. I started a emerge -e world.
Dale
:-) :-)
Just to update here. I started a emerge -e world. It has not even
finished yet but it appears to be working fine now. It was working
yesterday, last night, this morning and was working fine when I tried
just a minute ago. So, it appears that something needed to be
recompiled somewhere but no clue what that could have been.
I'll keep testing over the next few days and may report back if it is
still working correctly. I hope that it does tho. It was getting on my
nerves.
Useful tip to keep in mind:
Sometimes emerge -e world works out great. It's way overkill mostly but unlike
a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito, doesn't break the wall as well as kill the
insect :-)
IIRC, revdep-rebuild came about from the same line of thought. Some libs were
being wrongly linked or linked to missing stuff and it was a huge ball-ache to
find them all. Imagine running ldd on every binary and grepping for "not
found" :-) It might even have been a glibc update (memory weak this end).
revdep-rebuild finds the easily detectable stuff. But there's other problems
that can happen with binaries that are not so easy to check (or not known to
the dev), and none of the Gentoo tools help locate the culprit. emerge -e
world will just rebuild everything in sight with the nice side effect of
taking care of these mysterious problems. Hello sledgehammer. Pity that it
can't record what it fixed though.
It's interesting to see why Ubuntu and other binary distros never have this
problem. First, they don't rip foundation libs out underneath a running system
and insert different ones on the fly, and the API/ABI of their libs doesn't
change for the life of that release of the distro. Plus, their build farms
that generate new rpms/debs/pkgs nightly, essentially do the equivalent of a
full emerge -e world daily and copy the binaries to the download server
So sometimes when all else fails and suicide seems attractive, this is a
workable approach that can help. Now if we can just get the gcc upgrade docs
changed to reflect intelligent reality, we can get newbies to grok that emerge
-e world is not suitable for the *first* fault-finding tool one uses....
Yea, this for me was only considered when there was no more ideas
coming. People posted ideas and I tried different things but it still
messed up with no error that I could find.
I guess I could have just did a emerge -e nvidia-drivers and that would
have rebuilt everything needed by nvidia and should in theory have
worked. I do wish I knew what fixed it tho. It may be a bug or like
when we have to rebuild keyboard and mouse drivers after a xorg update.
It may be something that others need to know about as well. Right now,
we don't know what was wrong. This particular hammer just hit
everything instead of one nail that was popping up.
I just checked again, it is still working. I'm liking that I can watch
a video whenever I want instead of when it decides to work. ;-)
Dale
:-) :-)
