Re: Experiences with RC1 after running it for 24h

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@skolelinux.no>]

Tirsdag 26. januar 2010, skrev Ole-Anders Andreassen:
> I left iceweasel running when I left work yesterday,
> when I logged inn this morning, it was hanging.

A similar thing happened with OpenOffice on Diskless Workstations with 
Skolelinux 3.0. It happened faster thou. When the PC only got 256 MB RAM, 
the spell-checking exceeds the memory limit. Since the swap was not turned 
on, it was not enough memory left. Linux kernel killed the spell-checking 
process which made OpenOffice hang.  

Iceweasel aka Firefox or plugins (e.g Flash) might trigger memory leaks. 
The memory gets full including the limited swap area (which is not big on 
the default Diskless WS setting). To prevent Linux crashing, the process 
system in the kernel might kill a process which is needed for running 
Firefox. Then Firefox hangs. 

To check if lack of memory caused by memory leaks, you should check two 
things: 

-- First check the memory avaliable on the Diskless 
    Workstation (RAM+swap). 
-- Secondly you should check the memory usage log provided 
    in Nagios. According to Petter, Nagios also monitors 
    end user machines including Diskless Workstations. 

    If that's not working, this tracing method might work: 
http://linuxsysadminblog.com/2009/06/tracing-memory-leaks-with-pidstat/

Best regards

Knut Yrvin