Re: How do I stop system hangs?
On Thursday 02 November 2017 01:10:08 Borden Rhodes wrote:
> What kernel or other settings can I set to let me keep control of my
> computer during a runaway process? Basically, how do I tell Linux to
> keep just enough resources free so I can drop into a shell terminal
> and figure out what's going wrong?
>
> In context, this evening my computer hung for 30 minutes. The hard
> drive activity light went solid and it took about 10 minutes after
> hitting CTRL + ALT + F1 for a bash shell to appear. It didn't matter
> anyway, though, since the login process timed out if I attempted to
> log in.
>
> Unfortunately, there's a 30-minute gap in journalctl, so I can forget
> about figuring out what caused the hang or filing a bug report to the
> maintainers' satisfaction. Therefore, I'm more interested in keeping
> control of my computer in future.
>
> With thanks,
I haven't had that happen in ages. But because linux is a time sharing
system, capable of running hundreds of tasks, 168 ATM, the first thing I
start after a reboot is a root session of htop. I use a multiple tab
shell on workspace 1, out of ten, with a tail -fn50 on the system log on
the 2nd tab and a few tails on other background activities on more tabs
of that shell. That way I can have a pretty close to realtime view of
whats going on. And it doesn't normally have a huge lag in calling up
that workspace and shell tab to see htop. Why a root session? Easy, so
it has the rights to kill an errant process.
I guess you could call it a philosophy to keep control of my machines.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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