Mysterious freeze after leaving computer overnight [FIXED]

[Gatta]

Having run Gentoo since the start of April '04, I've always been quite happy with it, particularly the fact that I can leave my computer on overnight and come back to it without worry in the morning.

Lately, however, I've found that I can't. After leaving it on, the system is incredibly slow when I come back, to the point that :wq doesn't work even after a few seconds (when I gave up) in vim. top showed that nothing was eating the CPU and, while I didn't have more than 3-4MB free memory, a lot was used in buffers, so that wasn't the problem either.

Switching to a virtual terminal and logging in from there was equally slow (and I didn't wait for that to complete either), but when I switched back to vt7, the screen went grey and wouldn't respond to anything, so I had to manually reboot it.

FreeBSD's been looking rather appealing recently, especially with the in-kernel sound mixing, so if I can't get this issue (and my issue at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=290860) fixed, I might look at switching to that. Any ideas on anything?

[sven-tek]

either a kernel or a hardware problem. What does top show for the average load on the right, top corner?

is your output on dmesg clean?

[Gatta]

I can't see the dmesg, because my system freezes. There's a warning in the dmesg after I reboot:
WARNING: NR_CPUS limit of 1 reached. Processor ignored.
I'll see if it is a kernel problem by compiling myself a new love-sources.

[Gatta]

Ok, I've switched from mm-sources to ck-sources, and the problem still sems to be present. I managed to get a top fired off before everything froze up this morning (left system at 11:30 PM, came back at 9:40 AM) and these were the stats I noted:
CPU load: 47.28 46.66 45.11, 206 processes
99.8% of CPU idle.

I couldn't get "ps aux > file" to work before it crashed, but I did run "ps aux | less", and there seemed to be quite a lot of cron-related tasks still running from around 4 AM - I don't know if this is the cause of the slowdown or happened because of it.

Next time it happens (I'll try and induce it tonight) I'll get the RAM usage and a full process list, but any suggestions before then would be much appreciated.

[Gatta]

OK, it froze up again after I left the computer for 11 hours overnight. I couldn't get "ps aux > procfile", but I ran top and noted down the vital statistics on a bit of paper:

Load average 98.28, 97.33, 94.99
Up 1 day, 50 min
422 total tasks, 1 running, 337 sleeping, 84 zombie
CPU(s): 2.4% us, 0.7% sy, 16.8% ni, 79.8% id, 0.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 514908k total, 511312k used, 3596k free, 362284k buffers
Swap: 1004020k total, 1048k used, 1002972k free, 26872k cached

That's all the diagnostics I have, though I can get more if you need it. Actually, I have my uname -a, which is:
Linux aramis 2.6.10-ck5 #1 SMP Wed Feb 16 11:06:50 GMT 2005 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

[Gatta]

Problem solved. After noticing that "ps aux" listed lots of cronjobs, I tried "emerge -C vixie-cron && emerge dcron", and the problem seems to be fixed.