Video and Audio = Hangs

[Chris Rouch]

On 2/28/07, Fernando Apesteguía <fernando.apesteguia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/28/07, Fernando Apesteguía <fernando.apesteguia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello people,
> >
> > I had some hangs with my computer and after a bit of testings I was
> > able to reproduce it always.
> >
> > If I'm playing music and I try to use the Video card extensively
> > (moving Page Up and Down in Evince - this makes my CPU go to 100%) the
> > system hangs. It doesn't matter if I'm in X11 or console (mplayer
> > playing music and pdftotext rendering also hangs)
> >
> > Any ideas?
> > Any clues to perform more tests?

My system used to hang when it got very busy. Turned out the CPU was
overheating. There was nothing in the logs, and the lm_sensors weren't
showing anything unusual, but a dab of thermal paste made the hangs go
away. The other thing I'd check is memory - run memtest86 overnight
and see what it turns up. I would expect a system hang (as opposed to
a crash) to be hardware related 9 times out of 10.

Chris