Frequent Hangs w/ Fedora Core 2 on IBM ThinkCentre 8187-KU

[Eric Mader]

James Wilkinson wrote:

>>I had someone restart the machine four days ago. Since then it's been 
>>sitting in the logon prompt, and it's still running. When I came into 
>>the office this morning, the screen was in power saver mode. This seems 
>>consistent with the theory that the culprit may be the screen saver. On 
>>the other hand, if the screen saver isn't running, the machine isn't 
>>doing much...
> 
> 
> I'm having a bit of trouble parsing that. Are you saying that if the
> computer is sitting there, with no-one logged in at the console, and
> there's not even a screen saver to burn CPU cycles, then the computer
> is basically idle, and you suspect that the problems might be load
> related?

Basically. The person who restarted the machine just rebooted it and 
walked away. That means that it was sitting in the X logon screen for 
four days. (I assume, but haven't taken the time to check, that that 
means that the screen saver was not running. - when I came in this 
morning, the display was in stand-by mode, and when I woke the system 
up, it was still in the logon screen.)

> I'll take your word for it that the computer is idle if no-one is
> logged in at the console (it's certainly not true for all Unix-like
> systems).

Yes, I know. This is a system that I use for software development, so 
when I'm not actively doing that, the system is basically idle. It runs 
an FTP server and an NTPD and a few other thing, but it's main purpose 
in life is to hang around and wait for me to do software development...

> It sounds like a recent Pentium 4 or Celeron machine. These are known to
> be (electrical) power-crazed, and can output a *lot* of heat. But they
> have thermal protection in the CPU: they throttle down speed and power
> consumption if the temperature gets too high.

It's a 3G Pentium 4 w/ hyperthreading. Other posters have suggested that 
the problem is related to hyperthreading. I know that multi-processor / 
threading issues are often load related, so I was guessing that the 
added load of the screen saver might be a factor.

> I suppose that it *is* possible that on a badly designed system the
> extra heat from a loaded Pentium 4 could induce temperature related
> problems in the rest of the system.

Well, it's a commercial IBM product, I doubt that the problem is design 
related...

> But my money would still be on the screen saver (if I was a betting
> man...)
> 
> This sounds like an ideal candidate for the SETI at Home client, or
> something similar: get the machine doing useful work in the background,
> and see if it affects system stability.

Might be worth a try!

> James.

Regards,
Eric