On Tuesday 01 March 2011 23:14:12 Mick wrote: > Ha! I remember on an old machine when in WinXP would rarely if ever > crash, while in Gentoo would crash every time.
My machine is only about a year old, built by a specialist builder of high- performance systems, so it shouldn't be experiencing hardware failures. > Different OS' use memory differently. Indeed they do. My experience is the converse of yours: Gentoo does not hang, while Fedora and Mandriva do. It's not a problem with a particular area of the disks, as I've installed them both in different partitions and got the same result. I assume that some kernel options don't suit my motherboard. Don't all laugh, but it's an Asus P7P55D. > After a year or so though the WinXP installation eventually corrupted > itself irreparably, while Gentoo (on reiserfs) soldiered on. Eventually, I > bought new memory modules and there were no more crashes. Maybe I need to replace the memory. That's a bit drastic though when I haven't actually proved it faulty. > memtest 86+ showed no errors, so I didn't know what to blame for all > these crashes. It's well known that test programs can't stress a computer the way real life does. It was true of Ferranti Argus 500 systems in 1974, and I'm sure it's still true today. > After close observation I discovered that the machine would crash the > moment it tried to start swapping. Interesting. As far as I can tell though this box doesn't swap often - it can go weeks without doing so. As I said the other day, my 4GB is enough to contain the work I usually do. > This would typically happen in the middle of an emerge, which was rather > annoying, and/or when updatedb was running. At least you could re-run an aborted emerge; when my box hangs it just stops responding to keyboard and mouse, and the network interface stops receiving packets so I can't ssh in from another box to shut it down neatly. It's BRS time. -- Rgds Peter
