On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Alan Cox <alan(a)lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> When the system hangs, the mouse cursor will continue to move,
but
> it is very jumpy and sluggish. But otherwise the system is completely
> unresponsive (not just slow).
That sounds like it suddenly ran out of memory.
Try
echo "2" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
echo "80" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ration
and see if instead you suddenly see lots of out of memory errors and
applications going away
BTW, that's _ratio, not _ration.
Prior to this, those parameters were 0 and 50 respectively.
Ah, yes, as soon as I ran the first command, my X11 session
immediately aborted and I got sent back to the gdm login.
Although my memory use should have been pretty small
at the time (I had just rebooted so only a terminal window and
a single Firefox tab were running).
Does anything make /var/log/messages ?
Prior to changing the kernel flags above, no, nothing ever
showed up in syslog. But after this I saw something like this
right at the point of running the first command above:
Jun 24 14:03:44 deron kernel: [drm] Num pipes: 1
Jun 24 14:03:44 deron udevd[545]: udev_event_run: fork of child
failed: Cannot allocate memory
Jun 24 14:03:44 deron udevd[545]: udev_event_run: fork of child
failed: Cannot allocate memory
Jun 24 14:03:45 deron restorecond: Will not restore a file with more
than one hard link (/etc/resolv.conf) Cannot allocate memory
Jun 24 14:03:45 deron kernel: tomboy[2973]: segfault at 8968548 ip
08968548 sp bfaeab7c error 4
Jun 24 14:03:45 deron acpid: client connected from 4262[0:0]
Jun 24 14:03:45 deron bonobo-activation-server (dem-4259): could not
associate with desktop session: Failed to connect to socket /t
mp/dbus-vx4vmi4BAf: Connection refused
Jun 24 14:03:46 deron kernel: agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant
device at 0000:00:00.0.
Jun 24 14:03:46 deron kernel: agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at
0000:00:00.0 into 8x mode
Jun 24 14:03:46 deron kernel: agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at
0000:01:00.0 into 8x mode
Jun 24 14:03:47 deron kernel: [drm] Setting GART location based on new
memory map
Jun 24 14:03:47 deron kernel: [drm] Loading R300 Microcode
Jun 24 14:03:47 deron kernel: [drm] Num pipes: 1
Jun 24 14:03:47 deron kernel: [drm] writeback test succeeded in 1 usecs
Other than the udev errors, I don't know what to make of the others.
> This system is a Dell Optiplex GX270 (4-5 yrs old) with a Pentium
4 3GHz cpu
> with hyperthreading enabled, 1 MB ram. I am using LVM and LUKS encryption
> on the swap and /home.
1MB or 1GB. 1MB might be a bit slow so I suspect the latter ;)
Yes, a typo, 1 GiB physical memory.
I wonder if LUKS + swap might be the first suspect
Well, I looked a little closer and it may be my fault. The LVM
I have swap in was only 32 MB in size, not the 32 GB I had
intended! So my swap is way smaller than my physical memory.
Would that excessively small swap space size had resulted
in the abrupt hanging behavior I had witnessed?
I'm going to try to resize things and get my swap back up
to 32 GB. A little tricky due to LUKS being in the mix, but
I should be able to do it.
> The only hardware change in the system was replacing my old PCI
graphics
> card (Matrox Millenium II) with a brand new ATI Stealth X1050 AGP. This was
> necessary because the F9 graphical install was unusable; as the old card only
> had VGA output and the installer's X11 could not properly auto-detect the LCD
> widescreen monitor and was trying to drive it at too high a frequency. I needed
> to have DVI output for the F9 graphical install to work; so I had to get a new
> video card.
Which video driver are you using ?
The Fedora supplied driver, not the ATI add-on. I'm can't remember how
to figure out which X driver is being used anymore.
Thanks Alan
--
Deron Meranda