Re: What are the most common causes of linux system hangs?
On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 02:47:46AM -0700, Joe Emenaker wrote:
> Every now and then, I'll have a Debian box that starts having fits of hard
> system hangs. Sometimes, it goes away when I turn off a daemon. Other times,
> it goes away when I put the hard drives in an entirely different computer.
>
> Currently, I'm having this problem with one. Just... out of the blue, it
> will hang dead in its tracks. The keyboard doesn't even wake the screen so I
> can see if there are any kernel panic messages or anything. Ctrl-Alt-Del
> doesn't do anything. I have to hit the rest button.
>
> It doesn't seem to matter what's running becuase I've tried turning almost
> all of the daemons (except cron and a couple of others) off, and it still
> hung. It's happening more and more frequently, too. It used to be able to go
> for a week or two. Now, it barely makes it more than 4 hours or so.
I had a very similar problem with a 486 here some time ago ...
> Now, I'm pretty certain that it's some hardware problem. But, I'd like to
> avoid moving the whole system to a brand-new machine, find that the problem
> has gone away, and conclude that there's just *something* bad about the old
> server and that I need to chuck the whole thing.
... and this is what I was thinking at the time as well. But it wasn't.
> So, I'd like to isolate the problem, if I could.
>
> With that in mind, does anyone have any personal experience concerning what
> the problem usually is in these cases? Motherboard? RAM? Has it ever helped
> anyone to *under*clock the CPU?
>
> I'm anxious for any ideas....
What it turned out to be in my case was the kernel. I was running
2.2.10 or .11 - unfortunately it was long enough ago that I don't
remember exactly which. But when I upgraded to the latest (at the
time that was 2.2.13) the problem went away. It seems that the
kernel I had been using had some memory leak somewhere.
I'm not saying that this *is* your problem ... I'm just saying
that when I had a similar problem that's what fixed it for me.
--
Mike Werner KA8YSD | "Where do you want to go today?"
ICQ# 12934898 | "As far from Redmond as possible!"
'91 GS500E |
Morgantown WV | Only dead fish go with the flow.
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