System slowdown/non responsive incident

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20496

Was trying to post a short while ago when my system all of a sudden came to a crawl with LOTS of disk activity.
Mouse response was just about nil, and nothing else would respond. Ctrl-Alt-BkSpc was ignored (probably
delayed). Attempts to open terminals failed of course. Being paranoid as I am, I couldn't stop myself from
turning the power off. Fortunately my fs was repaired after several minutes. When I had Gnome up and running
again, Galeon crashed when I tried to start it, so I'm guessing it was having issues earlier. A second attempt
to load Galeon prompted me to discard the earlier session, then loaded fine.

Everything seems ok now, was just unsettling.
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AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

Are you asking a question or just posting a strange experience ?
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neuron · Advocate Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 2371

sounds to a problem I'v had on a very old box, it started swapping to disk and I hadn't turned dma on on the hd yet...

check out man hdparm

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20496

Just describing an experience. HD is fine from a config issue. First time anything like this has happened.
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AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

Odd, lets us know if you figure it out.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20496

Shall I become omnipotent, I will indeed

I'm thinking it was Galeon related. Perhaps the Galeon crash was dumping info or something.
Deciphering it I think is beyond me at this point... wouldn't even know where to begin.
If it repeats, well, I dunno... I'm just hoping it doesn't.
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AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

It would have been dumping alot of information to have caused that huh

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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20496

AHA! I am now omnipotent. Or not. Anyway, I was using Gimp prior to the crash and Gimp
itself crashed a couple of times. Will have to use Gimp some more... I bet it is the culprit.
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AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

Your using the masked version aren't you ?
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20496

I haven't used a masked version for anything yet. Help -> About reports v1.2.3
Maybe I'll emerge a new version this week.
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Malakin · Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2002 6:40 am Post subject:

I had a problem like this before, it wasn't on Gentoo but I ended up tracking it down to "slocate -u" which was being run as a daily cron job. dma was enabled and the system was a decent system with tons of ram but it would get to the point where you couldn't do anything including ctrl-alt-backspace although the drive would still be crunching away. Removing the cron job fixed it and I think changing kernels further down the road allowed it to run without problems. Probably not related to your experience, just sharing mine ;)

jago25_98 · Apprentice Joined: 23 Aug 2002 Posts: 180

yeah, this is always updatedb / slocate cronjobs in my experience

ash-nazg · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Alabama

I've had a fair number of system lockups myself since moving to 2.6.14-r5, and I'm convinced it's been updatedb causing it. I got to where I could predict a system lockup within a few minutes of booting up. Once I started watching for it (using top and tailing /var/log/messages), I could see it was updatedb. First it would eat up my CPU, then my system would get sluggish, then sometimes it would hang. Sometimes it would get killed, showing "Out of Memory: Killed process 8562 (updatedb)" in /var/log/messages, and my system would be usable again.

It seems odd to me that I found this Gentoo post from 2002, then see a Jan 2006 response on it, and now I'm adding to it. I wonder if an old bug has resurfaced.
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