Re: memories
<mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu> writes:
> I have a Debian box which has been rock-solid in the three years I've
> been using it. Currently it's slink with the 2.0.38 kernel
> (custom-compiled) and just a few extras in /usr/local. No other OS.
>
> Until recently it had just 32MB of RAM. I added 64 more on
> Saturday. Everything seemed fine to begin with---the 96MB was detected
> in BIOS and by the kernel; I had much less disk-thrashing in long
> Netscape sessions and so on. But ....
>
> If I leave the machine up overnight (as has been my habit) with nobody
> logged on and only cron jobs running, when I log on again in the
> morning, `top' tells me that almost all of the memory is in use
This would necessarily indicate a problem. Linux uses any memory that
isn't currently being used as disk cache. Overnight I believe the
updatedb command is run which accesses all of you hard drive and thus
it's likely Linux allocates all your free memory to disk cache. When
an application requests memory Linux will kindly reduce the amount of
memory being used for cache.
>, and
> when I try to work, I get constant segmentation faults (especially in
> resource-heavy applications like emacs, TeX, X ...) and sometimes a
> kernel-panic. Rebooting `fixes' the problem.
>
> The hardware: Pentium 2 (233 with 512K cache), an Asus P2L97 AGP
> Motherboard, Quantum 4.3GB SCSI Hard Drive.
>
> Are there tools available that would help me diagnose the problem and
> hopefully solve it?
Did these symptoms you're seeing only begin after you installed the
new memory? If so then that might indicate a bad memory chip. There's
a little utility called memtest in the sysutils package that might be
able to detect it. There's an even more thorough test in the hwtools
package (memtest86) that you actually boot into, via floppy. I haven't
used these in a LONG time so maybe someone else can give you more
details on them. Don't rely on your BIOS memory test. It isn't very
thorough.
Gary
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