Re: lock-up with thrashing
On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 01:37:12AM -0400, Michael Soulier wrote:
>
> So, I get home from finally seeing the X-Men movie (I truly
> expected them to hack it up horribly, but I was impressed...) to
> find my Debian box thrashing away like crazy. The mouse would
> barely respond, and a ctrl-alt-backspace only partially shut
> down X. It just sort of hung while the system went nuts, the
> harddrive sounding like it was about to blow its way out the
> side of the tower. I waited and waited, but it didn't give me a
> prompt, so I finally hit the reset. It came back up fine, and
> all is well now, but looking in the various logs, I can't tell
> what it was doing when this occurred. If someone can give me a
> hint of what to look for and where, I'd love to track this down
> to prevent it happening again.
It wasn't perhaps a cron job running 'find ...' to update the database
for the locate command? That tends to bring most activity to a near
halt until it finishes. You can correlate the scheduled time of the
cron job with the time this was going on. Though, it could have been
another process was greedily eating up memory and the kernel was trying
to utilize the last few shreds it had available. Also, might help to
report what kernel version.
--
According to MegaHAL:
The emu is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace.
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