On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 06:16, Derek Jennings wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 April 2002 8:08 pm, you wrote:
> > I can hardly believe it, but my 8.1 box crashes 4 or 5 times a day. My
> > wife, a devoted Windows fan, is laughing her head off. The symptoms vary,
> > so for all I know I may have multiple problems. They are:
> >
> > 1. The X server often crashes. I once had this problem when I ran out of
> > room on root, but df tells me I have 1.5G free now. In such cases I hold
> > ctrl-alt-del depressed until I can force a reboot. Is there a way to
> > restore a crashed X server short of rebooting?
> >
> > 2. Sometimes I am kicked out of my current session with no warning and
> > taken to the user login prompt.
> >
> > 3. The GUI often becomes unresponsive. The mouse works, but even something
> > as simple as a terminal can't open, and already open apps are unresponsive.
> > If I switch to tty1 and check top, invariably X is sucking up all the CPU's
> > cycles. (Again, all I know how to do in such cases is reboot. Is there a
> > more elegant solution?)
> >
> > 4. An extreme case of no. 3 is that neither the mouse nor the keyboard
> > work. I can usually manage to reboot by using advice previously posted to
> > this list, which is to depress in order Alt-SysRq-r, Alt-SysRq-t,
> > Alt-SysRq-s, Alt-SysRq-b. That is supposed to perform a graceful shutdown,
> > but in fact upon reboot the filesystem always has to be repaired.
> >
> > Those are the symptoms, now here are a few observations and notes:
> >
> > A. The system is less stable when I use light applications and windows
> > managers vs. heavy ones. For example, I crash more often in IceWM than in
> > KDE. I crash more often using Sylpheed than using Evolution.
> >
> > B. The system only crashes when I am actively working on it. I've left it
> > run XMMS, efax, and such for two days without touching it. No problem. But
> > it can't last for even a couple of hours of answering email, word
> > processing, and so forth.
> >
> > C. Other than A I haven't detected any particular applications that make my
> > system more or less stable. I've tried different email clients, browsers,
> > word processors, spreadsheets, etc., in search of some patterns, and
> > conclude that the crashes don't seem to be related to any user application.
> >
> > D. My installation is LM 8.1 with the stock kernel, 2.4.8-26mdk, and
> > XFree86 3.3.6. My video adaptor is a SiS 620.
> >
> > Does anyone have any clues to help me track down the source of my crashes?
> > What should I be looking at?
>
> Just a guess, but you do have a swap partion don't you?, and if you do is it
> large enough? ('top' in a console window will tell you)
>
> Other than that I would start thinking about a memory problem. It is possible
> for bad memory to show up in Linux, but not windows.
>
> HTH
>
> derek
>
Sounds to me like Derek is on the right track regarding memory.
memtest86 is on the CDs. If it is a memory issue, that will probably
track it down.
Your observation about it being less crash prone in "heavy" apps than
"light" doesn't really square with that diagnosis (or with the swap file
idea either), but what you are describing here is sufficiently flaky to
point at memory first.
If memtest doesn't find anything conclusive, it may be time to try the
"clean contacts and reseat components" routine.
Good luck
Brian
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