M. Feenstra wrote: > Thank's for you answer. Yes I have read the FAQ (some people actually do). > That is where I came up with the memory as a suspect. > > The reason I still ask is that is crashes the system. It does not quit with > an "out of memory" kind of error but just freezes the whole device. What I > would like to know if this is expected behaviour?
it isn't so much a "crash" as every running task is waiting for some other running task to release some RAM/swap so it can continue. Computers are very patient. Granted, from a user standpoint, it is almost indistinguishable from a crash, as the machine is not doing what you want, and that won't change IF that is what is going on, at that point, there is really only one big task running, and that task is only going to want more RAM, not give some up. On the other hand, if you have 1G of swap AVAILABLE AT BOOT and 128M RAM, the system should ultimately come back up...but it will take a very long time, as it will be in swap-hell for an hour or more (or less). If your swap is on the same spindle as the big partition you are checking, it will be a lot longer than if it is a different spindle. If your swap is not active yet (i.e., swap-to-file on a partition which you need to fsck, not sure what happens if it is specified in fstab), it doesn't help you here. Nick.
