Re: PC Slowdowns and Lock-ups
Mike McCarty wrote:
I suggest you start top running and just leave it so. It consumes very
little resources. You could put the window in all workspaces. I would
not think that memory failures would lead to slowdown, but rather a
crash. One possibility is some device generating numerous interrupts.
For example, you may have some device on your LAN which is chattering,
and sending numerous invalid packets, causing your NIC to interrupt
your CPU extrememly frequently. This particular error might leave
something in /var/log. A quick test would be to disconnect all
external devices which might cause something like this. Pull your
LAN connection or DSL or whatever.
Also, use all your senses. LISTEN to your machine. Is the disc busy?
Perhaps you already thought of this. But I'd try to get all my
senses involved, smell, tactile, etc. (Maybe not *taste*!).
Another thought: are you sure the machine is not crashed but just
extremely slow? It might be difficult to discern the difference.
I haven't read all the posts in this thread, so I may have missed this,
but... How is your memory usage? Could you be thrashing in and out of swap?
My system has started to occaisionally run slow, lately, as well. I am
not using up all my swap (well, I did once) but it seems to be using a
lot. The last couple of times that this happened I noticed that there
was a javavm process running and when I killed it, the swap dropped down
to a reasonable amount and the system picked right back up. Of course,
it took out Mozilla Suite, or Firefox along with the VM, but what can
you do. This also requires that your system is still usable enough to
be able to check top, or ps, or somesuch and kill whatever is problematic.
--
Marc Shapiro
mshapiro_42@yahoo.com
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