Fedora 6 strange hangs

[David Timms]

Jim Cox wrote:
>> Frank Cox wrote:
>> > On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:08:48 +0100
>> > Al Graziano <al.graziano at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Maybe, but I should still be able to trace it. I just want to
>> >> troubleshoot the problem and identify the root cause
>> >>
>> >> Any idea on what to look for/at
>> >
>> > You could boot a Freedos disk on it and start running a DOS program 
>> that
> loads
>> > the CPU and see if it the beeps/lockups/whatever happen then.
>> >
>> > If the problem continues, it's a hardware or power issue.
>>
>> If it is anything like the Firefox problem on my wife's machine, it is
>> not hardware or power.  The X session and everything else is solid for
>> days on end.  Just Firefox terminates unexpectedly, sometimes when the
>> machine is not in use.  Sometimes after 30 minutes sometimes after many
>> hours.
>>
>> -Andy
> 
> I've had the same experience as Andy, variations on losing the display,
> having
> it lock-up, etc., most frequently when the box was under heavy I/O load 
> (e.g.
> using
> Azureus for bittorrent transfers).
I experienced this a while ago see: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199882

In fact, I download a vm image from torrent.vmware.com last night/today, 
  and after azureus being run for about 16 hours, it had top showing 
 >1100M for VIRT, and the 512MB system was using 1500M of it's 2000M 
swap file. closing the torrent tabs and exiting azureus seems to release 
the memory and change the load from 3+ back to 0.2-0.3, although there 
is still 195MB of swap used. There are a lot of exceptions seen if 
azureus is started from a terminal.
# java -version
java version "1.4.2"
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-51)

Previously, if I left azureus running for days {eg 48 hours), the 
machine becomes to slow to be usable eg 15 minutes to bring a window to 
the foreground - the suggested workaround of ssh in from another 
computer is quite effective.

DaveT.