Disk Sleep + Zombie = Frustration!

Anne Wilson cannewilson at googlemail.com
Fri Apr 8 14:45:32 UTC 2011


On Thursday 07 April 2011 21:12:27 Richard wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 03:45:19PM +0100, 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> remember to check /var/log/messages and watch dmesg when you hit strange
> problems like that, it is certainly unexpected that a 200 MB scan would
> nuke your system. It might be a flaky USB drive rthat got into way or
> something like that.
> 
I knew that there is a known limit for size, but didn't expect it to be 
anywhere near that low.  I did the same scan again later, with the same 
result.  After the next reboot I did it again with 200dpi which produced a 
meagre 31KB scan.  That saved without a problem.

There's not much chance of monitoring anything while it is actually happening 
unless I can do it from the command line in a second terminal - which I 
haven't tried, but will do next time I see it.  All KDE utilities seem to be 
brought to the knees when this happens.

Anne
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