freeze

[cast-fish]

Hello

oh dear...i feel like such a fool because i had a lovely message typed up for the "off topics" forum about the Rasberry pi computer.......... and then my laptop just froze...

This freeze has happened before......... with the exact same scenario.

It's a blank laptop without any hard drive....... but with tcl booted off a CD (3.8.2)

Then i have installed Alsa sound and Minefield 4 and Flash.  This all works correctly. There isn't anything else installed on the machine and it seems to run fine with any type of web browsing, flash and sound are fine. Maybe there are 3  tabs are open in Minefield but nothing excessive. No firefox extensions are installed or anything out of the ordinary...

Then, all of a sudden, after about 20 minutes the laptop freezes up.....this has happened a few times with the exact same scenario.

Any ideas here?....is this a hardware temperature issue?

V.

[gerald_clark]

No hard disk means no swap.
You probably ran out of RAM due to flash using up /tmp.

[cast-fish]

Hello

well it seems that this freeze is diagnosed.

Basically i go to Facebook website and a couple of other tabs are open. Then after a while on the Facebook tab the freeze occurs and it takes about 5 minutes before a message appears saying "there is a script that has stopped responding on this page" and I click to stop
this script and then another similar message appears and i click to stop that script then
Minefield completely crashes.

The freeze then dissapears and normal TCL usage resumes.

So it's a Facebook problem and browsers. But the time delays are large....too large.


V.

[cast-fish]

oh really?

it's RAM is it?


Opera seams to be running fine....multiple tabs or whatever...

would Minefield run out of ram on just 3 tabs?....non of those were even playing flash...and the
machine had only just been booted....ram would not be full surely?....(there was very little surfing done)

Minefield seems to freeze again with just one tab showing tinycore web page. Again it gives the "script not responding" message....(this is after it was all killed off previously and fresh instances were started)

i am really not sure, but with so little activity, how could it be exhausted ram?

V.

[gerald_clark]

Where do you think browser cache resides?
Run top in another window, and keep an eye on the available RAM.

[cast-fish]

ok...but does TOP show the ture available ram.....i remember reading threads on here
that state the many people don't understand how top is qouting what ram is available etc?

i will take a look at available ram while browsing

thanks

i could also lower the cache in the browser settings right?

V.

[cast-fish]

ok gerald

well this machine now has a 580 meg swap on pen drive...

ok, my question is...what is the bootcode  that makes the machine boots up tcl and ignore ALL /tce extensions
but find the swap partition?


thanks

Vince.

[cast-fish]

yes...does top show the true available ram?

anyway....i don't have a clue about browsers and Ram and cache and swap

my latest effort is

a) reduce Minefield cash to 25 megabytes max


it now seems happy with 3 or 4 tabs and is running pretty good really...it's video streaming in one of the tabs

so it's greatly improved from 1 hour ago.

So how will minefield be doing hings now?...will it use swap as it's cache place?

i mean to say...it's running much better than an hour earlier just by adding the swap and lowering the cache.

Top shows that pretty much all the ram is used up...2165000K used.....720 free....2680K buff  .....37388 cached

if that is any help

i used "base" as the bootcode to get a fresh tcl

V.

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish

i could also lower the cache in the browser settings right?

The default setting for this on most browsers tends to be greedy, knock it down. As gerald_clark
suggested, start top. You might also want to pay attention to the  %CPU  column to see if the
browser is chewing up all the CPU cycles when you think it froze. As far as the swap is concerned,
I've seen that covered on the forum, try searching for  swapon  and  mkswap. You also neglected
to mention just how  "RAM challenged"  your machine is.

[cast-fish]

thanks for replying Rich,

i know this stuff is extremely low key...i should read and google

it seems to be working pretty much ok now. It's Reasonable browsing with a few tabs open and some
streaming video. I mean, that is close to the typical kind of browsing i do.

This laptop has 256 megabyte sd ram. The cpu is 1.2 ghz athlon mobile by AMD.

top showed them results above....so yes you are right....browsers just eat all the ram don't they.

It's true, i know nothing about what browser cache actually is and what it's doing, or indeed what a swap
file does. (does swap it appear to Linux as a chunk of extra ram....?)

thanks for the advice.

recently i have had very good results in win32 browsing...real upshots by using firefox extensions. and
Minefield 4 pre alpha.


V

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish
A swap file is used by the memory manager as an extension of the existing RAM. When the memory manager
needs more RAM than is currently free, it takes blocks of RAM that have not been accessed recently but are still
required by currently running programs, and saves their contents to the swap file. It then reallocates that RAM
to the program that requested it. When there is a need for something that was sent to the swap file, something
else will get swapped out to make room for it to be swapped back in.
The basic purpose of the browsers cache is speed up the browser by keeping a local copy of whatever you view.
I believe most browsers have a caching algorithm that looks something like this:

void Cache_It(char *CurrentPageContent, long long CurrentPageSize)
{
if(AvailableMemory > CurrentPageSize)
    AddToRAMCache(CurrentPageContent, CurrentPageSize);
else if(AvailableDiskSpace > CurrentPageSize)
    AddToDiskCache(CurrentPageContent, CurrentPageSize);
else
    FreezeFor_n_MilliSeconds(CurrentPageSize);
return;
}

[cast-fish]

Hello Rich,

Thanks for a simple explanation that makes sense.

So "swap" basically is quite a good idea. Well it certainly seems so
because it's brought an old laptop up to usable level here.
See, this laptop is now usable. It's serving a purpose via tcl
and some tweaking of things.

That usability has come about from introducing a simple
swap file on pen drive. Also reducing the cache setting in
minefield.

i appreciate the advice Rich because it has a useful outcome. It's
a usable laptop for web surfing and other things also. The cpu is pretty
ok for speed.

It's handy to have that laptop lying around. See, via the "hibernate" option
it can be always "warm" and ready to use with tcl. It's just handy to have it
and it didn't take too much effort after your advice.

There are quite a few computers here. About 6 spare desktops and a couple
of laptops and all of them are fit for tinycore. They become very useful devices
and serve a purpose. It always seems like a hurrendous waste to throw away
a computer that works. I have a lot of ram sticks here. The machine would not
need hard drives but could still function quite well with tinycore.

thanks again,

V.

[cast-fish]

Yes thanks again

I must search back on this forum now to find the posts about "hibernate" in tcl.

Currently i can only "standby or suspend" with the "woken machine apps not working".
The wake up does not re-energise the pen drive where /tce optional is...... as the pen sits inside a usb hub.

If you plug-re-plug the pendrive it's then possible to mount it and use it...but tcl
has named the pen drive with further sequencial letters not like the "name" before it
was "suspended"

sb1 becomes sc1....thus tcl apps in the "woken machine" don't work and the "woken machine" is really no use.

any ideas here?

I  have successfully used "standby" before and the "woken machine" has been fine. i am certain that was with
an mircoSD card reader and card....USB again. So maybe it finds certain pens and not other pens when waking?

any ideas?

otherwise i will try to use hibernate....(that should work)

thanks

Vince.

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish
That's a different topic and you really should start a new thread for that.

[cast-fish]

oh yes...very sorry about that.

V.