Strange system lockups.
I am having some weird system lockup problems. My computer goes in to heavy HD caching every Sunday evening or Monday morning and locks up, I cannot move the mouse in X nor can I switch to any other virtual terminals. I checked all the cron jobs in cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly and none of them take more than 3 seconds to run. My /etc/crontab only has anacron running. I checked my syslog, it doesn't report anything happening at this time. I am the only user on my system. I have never had this problem before installing Debian (Woody) on my computer, my previouse Windows and RedHat installations ran without a problem. I usually run my computer 24/7, with reboots and shutdowns every now and then, and this problem has been coming up for several weeks and always on Sunday evening or Monday morning. If can help me shed some light on this problem, I would much appreciate the help. -- Kamil Kisiel www.speechlessarts.com
Re: Strange system lockups.
on Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 09:00:53PM -0700, Kamil Kisiel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I am having some weird system lockup problems. My computer goes in to heavy HD caching every Sunday evening or Monday morning and locks up, I cannot move the mouse in X nor can I switch to any other virtual terminals. Note that caching and high disk use are two separate things. Are you certain that the issue is caching? It might help to run a top session in batch mode, with logged output, to watch top processes and system resource utilization, to watch trends. I checked all the cron jobs in cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly and none of them take more than 3 seconds to run. My /etc/crontab only has anacron running. I checked my syslog, it doesn't report anything happening at this time. I am the only user on my system. There's a process accounting utility (I'm trying to find it, think it's the 'acct' package) which logs the start of every command executed on the system. I've found this more useful as a debug tool than for accounting per se. You also don't specify your memory and swap configuration. They might be...? -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA!http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hirehttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgpvYYgQ1VFuT.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Strange system lockups.
On August 20, 2001 12:54 pm, Karsten M. Self wrote: on Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 09:00:53PM -0700, Kamil Kisiel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I am having some weird system lockup problems. My computer goes in to heavy HD caching every Sunday evening or Monday morning and locks up, I cannot move the mouse in X nor can I switch to any other virtual terminals. Note that caching and high disk use are two separate things. Are you certain that the issue is caching? Well, I am not certain it's a disk caching problem, but I can't fathom what else could possibly be using my HD for well over an hour. It might help to run a top session in batch mode, with logged output, to watch top processes and system resource utilization, to watch trends. I checked all the cron jobs in cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly and none of them take more than 3 seconds to run. My /etc/crontab only has anacron running. I checked my syslog, it doesn't report anything happening at this time. I am the only user on my system. There's a process accounting utility (I'm trying to find it, think it's the 'acct' package) which logs the start of every command executed on the system. I've found this more useful as a debug tool than for accounting per se. I will download this package and run it to see if I can catch this problem... thanks for the hint. You also don't specify your memory and swap configuration. They might be...? I have 128MB of RAM and 400MB of swap space, I don't think I am short on either. Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; charset=us-ascii; name=Attachment: 1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: -- Kamil Kisiel www.speechlessarts.com
Re: Strange system lockups.
Ok, this acct program is not going to do it. According to it's man pages, the kernel only logs to acct after a process has terminated. Since whatever is locking up my system obviously doesn't terminate (otherwise my system would not be locked up from processor/HD use), this doesn't do me a whole lot of good. Any other ideas? -- Kamil Kisiel www.speechlessarts.com
Re: Strange system lockups.
Unfortunately I don't have anything to add as a suggestion, but I just wanted to say that I've had this same problem. For me, I don't have a remote way into my box, so I have no way of killing whatever process may be doing this, but just recently I had this happen upon opening my email and it corrupted most of my email directory. I also had it happen while I was bunzip2ing my new kernel source, and the resulting tar file was corrupt. Both times I had to do a hard reboot (ala power switch) to get any results. One thing I've noticed, though, was that even though the hard light was on, there wasn't actually any sound of activity coming from the drive. Just my pennies worth of info... Jeremy
Re: Strange system lockups.
on Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:07:33PM -0700, Kamil Kisiel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On August 20, 2001 12:54 pm, Karsten M. Self wrote: on Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 09:00:53PM -0700, Kamil Kisiel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Note that caching and high disk use are two separate things. Are you certain that the issue is caching? Well, I am not certain it's a disk caching problem, but I can't fathom what else could possibly be using my HD for well over an hour. slocate can run for a while, though an hour is excessive in my experience. You also don't specify your memory and swap configuration. They might be...? I have 128MB of RAM and 400MB of swap space, I don't think I am short on either. You may want to set some logging to note when your system swap utilization starts climbing, and add to this ps output sorted by memory utilization. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA!http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hirehttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgpBJ7ycD05vc.pgp Description: PGP signature
