Re: [newbie] Strange crashes when idle
AKA: Wit's End Still trying to find the source of this memory leak in my system. I reinstalled XFree86 4.2 from the binaries off of their website, but this has not made any apparent difference. The only real information I have is that it only leaks while X is running, so presumably that narrows down the culprits, but not enough for me to work out what it is. Someone please help! :) This is getting extremely frustrating. Pippin -- And I said 'Oh boy... right... again.' - Laurie Anderson, Let X=X http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~chikken/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Strange crashes when idle
Something glares at me. can you set your BIOS for APIC instead of PIC? Not sure, but will try. I have noticed some instability, filesystem dependent, on the binary-only NVIdia drivers from the distro, somewhat but not completely removed by the more recent Mandrake-specific drivers from the site. The XFree drivers do not sem to be subject to this problem. Now this strikes me as possibly being an issue. I've run free at various points today to have a look, and there certainly appears to be a memory leak from what I can tell... I'll include results here, if someone can analyse I'd appreciate it: free before starting X (12pm): [Note that this was after shutting X down, not after a complete system restart, so it looks like most of the memory's already leaked away...] total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 203200 52644 0 11368 76844 -/+ buffers/cache: 114988 140856 Swap: 262544728 261816 free after starting X (12pm): total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 224312 31532 0 11512 82264 -/+ buffers/cache: 130536 125308 Swap: 262544728 261816 free (6:49pm): total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 233508 22336 0 11576 86804 -/+ buffers/cache: 135128 120716 Swap: 262544728 261816 free after closing X down (6:50pm): total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 211584 44260 0 11576 84936 -/+ buffers/cache: 115072 140772 Swap: 262544728 261816 free after restart and no X (~6:52pm): total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 35752 220092 0 1768 19896 -/+ buffers/cache: 14088 241756 Swap: 262544 0 262544 free with X running (7:06pm): total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:255844 78500 177344 0 2488 41332 -/+ buffers/cache: 34680 221164 Swap: 262544 0 262544 Sorry for the amount of text here... it certainly looks to me like memory leaks away while X is running, and isn't restored when X quits, until you restart and reset everything. This could well be the NVIDIA drivers? So I'm going to download the source and recompile. I ran this card with Mandrake 8.0 and no problems, but compiled the nvidia drivers from source that time. Maybe that's it. Thanks very much for the help so far! Pippin -- And I said 'Oh boy... right... again.' - Laurie Anderson, Let X=X http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~chikken/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] Strange crashes when idle
Hi all, I don't know if I consider myself a newbie, having run linux of some sort for about three years, but I don't consider myself an expert, so here I am. My problem is unfortunately hard to describe, and what I'm really looking for is ideas for establishing what the problem might be. Basically, I installed Mandrake 8.2 a few days ago, and it's crashed once or twice a day since then. I was tolerating it, until this morning's crash when my root partition was damaged. Now I want to get to the bottom of it. When it's crashed I can see that my CPU meter is suggest a very high CPU load (around 4 lines high on a standard xload meter). Various things lock up, generally my web browser. I'm suspicious of mozilla/galeon at present, but don't really know for sure. Eventually the whole thing dies, and I can ctrl-alt-F1 etc to get to a shell, but if I run anything (like pine) the whole thing stops, and eventually I can't do anything (like login from another prompt). At that point I have to reset my computer... As I said, this morning the disk was damaged by this, and I had to manually run fsck to fix it up. Annoying. Anyone experience similar weird problems? I'm going to try not running any mozilla based browsers for a while, to see if that helps at all. I'll let you know if it does. Thanks for any help you can offer me! Pippin Barr -- And I said 'Oh boy... right... again.' - Laurie Anderson, Let X=X http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~chikken/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Strange crashes when idle
how much memory do you have? 256 meg RAM is it shared video mem? Video card is an NVIDIA GeforceMX with 32 meg. how much disk space do you have? (type df, and post it) It's a 20 gig hard drive. df yields: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hde2 3283000104844 3011384 4% / none127920 0127920 0% /dev/shm /dev/hde6 1007960267132689624 28% /home /dev/hde1 8210880 4533952 3676928 56% /mnt/windows /dev/hde5 7055648 2102708 4594524 32% /usr also type cat /proc/interrupts and let us see that. CPU0 0: 649067 XT-PIC timer 1: 10128 XT-PIC keyboard 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 4: 143580 XT-PIC serial 5: 25506 XT-PIC usb-uhci 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 10: 215504 XT-PIC nvidia 11: 27166 XT-PIC ide2 12: 11946 XT-PIC cmpci 15: 83 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 LOC: 0 ERR: 0 MIS: 0 did you install (clean, format all linux partitions?) or Upgrade? It was an install, but I didn't format the /home directory (to keep my data, of course). Fairly certain formatted everything else. try running top as the first thing when you see the slowdown. my guess is no free hard drive space (in say /etc or /var), or a lost swap file. Will do that and report back on it. Thank you for that, my main problem has been just trying to think of how I can figure out what's up. PJ -- And I said 'Oh boy... right... again.' - Laurie Anderson, Let X=X http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~chikken/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [newbie] Strange crashes when idle
We had a similar problem. We had weird symptoms such as a logger looked like it was running away, find made the machine hang (had to use the power button on that one) but only sometimes. Turned out to be flaky RAM. As soon as we replaced it and doubled it, all was right with the world. We used http://www.memtest86.com/ for testing the RAM. Mmmm. Normally I'd think the same thing, except that I've already been through the bad RAM episode last year with this computer. I had the RAM replaced and, as you said, all was well. I guess I should test it again anyway to be sure. The scary thing was that last time I used a RAMtester it didn't find anything, but the RAM _was_ corrupt. Yikes. Thanks :) Pippin -- And I said 'Oh boy... right... again.' - Laurie Anderson, Let X=X http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~chikken/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
