Disk Sleep + Zombie = Frustration!

Gabriel Ramirez gabriello.ramirez at gmail.com
Thu Apr 7 18:22:36 UTC 2011


On 04/07/2011 09:45 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
> Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if an
> application went down it didn't take other processes with it.  Sadly this no
> longer seems to be true.

Hi,

well an application cannot bring the system down but sent all other 
programs to swap so the system  is slow down to a crawl.

I saw the above two or three times,

in a ocasion amarok grab a 1.5Gb of RAM (2Gb RAM total), RES field from 
top so all other apps were sent to the swap, so the system was unusable 
but I always have a top instance running in a terminal so with a littlr 
patience I killed the amarok process, and the system eventually 
recovered his responsiveness.

in other ocassion was vlc in that case, I will not be able to switch to 
the virtual desktop having the top running, the graphics was stuck, but 
I was able to login to ssh and after running top and press M I found vlc 
and killed it, but that took 4 or 5 minutes.

> Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB.  When I tried to save it it
> started, but then went into Disk Sleep.  XSane and, believe it or not, Libre
> Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I could find in System
> Monitor.  Eventually, remember previous episodes, I asked for a system
> restart.  The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me with no option but to
> power down.

what format was saving to, I know which jpeg will be slow down the 
system because that size and jpeg compression isn't practical

but maybe your problem is totally diferent, maybe next time if you run 
top that give some light about the problem.

regards,


Gabriel


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