Weird freeze

[Ian Malone]

On 21 August 2012 23:43, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> It just happened again.  I have reason to think that Firefox is responsible,
> but at present, it's just a guess.  (One way I can tell it's happening is
> that I have an analog desktop clock running, and don't maximize windows.  As
> long as the sweep-second hand's moving, I know the box hasn't froze.)
>
> None of the Magic SysReq keys worked, and I ended up using the reset button
> again.  After rebooting and logging in, I opened a terminal and as root ran
>
> tail -f /var/log/messages
>
> to watch what, if anything happened.  I then used RightAlt-SysReq-r and saw
> the response that the keyboard had been set back to default.  Using s caused
> an emergency sync, so I know that it works when I'm in X, something I hadn't
> tried before.  Now we know, it's not just X that hangs, it's everything.
> Any suggestions as to how to find out what's causing this?  (If it's lack of
> RAM, I'm kinda stuck as the mobo's maxed out and I can't afford an upgrade
> ATM.)

So, funnily I had to deal with a machine that was apparently randomly
freezing a week ago. It was running out of RAM and turned out not to
have a swap partition enabled (there was a swap partition, but not
being used). There were messages in /var/log/messages reporting
oom-killer had been invoked. This seems to be less of a problem if
there's a swap partition as the machine slows down first instead and
seems to be more stable as a result. It was however an older version
of Ubuntu being run and definitely not Firefox that was running down
the memory. Of course bad memory, if that's the case, would look
different to out of memory. How much memory is on the machine? You
might have said elsewhere, but I can't see it on this thread.

Narrowing it down to firefox, possibly tricky (FWIW, I'm running F16
and not having this problem). From your original description it
happened while reading stuff online, so the computer is sitting not
doing much. Is it feasible to leave it running for a while not doing
anything with some other apps open instead? Then A/B that with
Firefox? Tedious and time-consuming unfortunately.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk