Hi! I'm running Mandrake 7.1 on my home computer, an AMD K-6/450 with 64
MB RAM, 6.5 GB HD. I get up early, and I'm used to seeing cron jobs start
to run at 4 a.m. while I'm at the computer. The hard drive starts doing
things, the mouse gets a tiny bit jumpy, and performance slows down a bit,
but not too bad.
What I'm not used to, but I've been seeing in recent weeks (don't know
exactly how long), is some bizarre behavior in the early evening hours and
at times on weekends. The mouse gets much jumpier than it does during the
morning cron jobs, the hard drive seems to do more, and performance is
noticeably slower. What's more, when I was running WordPerfect 8 for Linux
recently in the early evening while this behavior was going on, it
repeatedly caused X to crash and return me to the login prompt (runlevel 5)
after a few minutes of operation. (I was running an IceWM session when
this first happened, and then I ran WordPerfect in a KDE session to see if
it would happen again. It did.) WordPerfect has crashed or frozen up
sometimes before, but it never before caused X to crash.
Yesterday my computer was turned on but not in use from the time I went to
work (about 7:30 a.m.) until evening. No bizarre behavior happened that
evening. More often, other members of my family run applications
(including the resource-hogging but not so crash-prone StarOffice 5.2,
which they like much more than I do) on my computer during the day, and
then I've often found the bizarre behavior happening in the evening. This
makes me wonder whether "cron" is making something happen in the early
evening, but only after some applications have been run earlier in the
day--or, if not that, what?
I've dutifully looked through 120 search results for "cron" and not found
anything specific to this problem. If anyone on this list can help me
solve it, thanks in advance!
Dave "Pa" McClamrock
