TCL freezing up

[ananix]

Im still experiencing TCL just freezing up, does anyone have an idea what could cause this? Can I write it up as buggy hardware?
Its rare, on different machines, and only doing heavy workload. Can it be system recourses my experience is just that linux is normaly able to handle that quite nice seen from a manager perspective.

I even had a faulty RAM block the other day and TCL keept running though must data request resulted in and error the OS it self ran fine. Running out of RAM is usaly not a problem for TCL either.

The problem is i have never really tried this happening in true64, reliant or redhat (SL). Had lots of problems with weird behavior in FreeBSD. Major difference is the hardware platform i have used for the prior and my TCL.

Anyone experiencing this?

[Rich]

Hi ananix
Very very rarely, I've had the desktop become unresponsive but could still move the mouse under Tinycore 4.1.
I then had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace into the console and restart X. The few times it happened to me always coincided
with me doing something in midnight commander.
I think someone once reported a Samba issue that looked like it froze the system, but really was using up all the
CPU cycles as it thrashed the memory management system taking more and more RAM.

[curaga]

The usual cause for freezing is running out of RAM. All reported occurrences have been running without swap, which leaves little space for the kernel to maneuver.

Do you have swap?

[ananix]

ok so no real freeze been reported im dead sure its really frozen when it happens not just the X.

I have tryed running out of swap and memory numerous times on all platforms never seen it respond like this, im a firm beleaver of having double swap space compared to RAM but the machines i take over is not always like that, i have a 16G  autodesk flame workstation (RH) with 2G of RAM and a lousy program that sometimes eats it all leaving no room for the program as the OS has to page for the smallest program instructions, but again never anything like freezing when running out of RAM, only faulty RAMs should really on rare occasions freeze a machine.

I think im going for to fast developed hardware for consumers is the reason for my rare but defently frozen TCL's. One should try look for firmware upgrades next time it happens.

Thanks guys for sharing your experiences!

  -- Regards Andreas

[Rich]

Hi ananix
You could try using the  syslog  boot code. Once the machine is up, copy  /var/log/messages  to a persistent location
and create a link back to  /var/log/messages. If the machine locks up, you can reboot and see if there are any
interesting entries in the previous  messages  file.

[tinypoodle]

Hi ananix
You could try using the  syslog  boot code. Once the machine is up, copy  /var/log/messages  to a persistent location
and create a link back to  /var/log/messages. If the machine locks up, you can reboot and see if there are any
interesting entries in the previous  messages  file.

with a possibly even higher chance by logging over IP

When the machine is frozen, is there any response to the "Alt + SysRq + R-E-I-S-U-B" sequence or not?

[ananix]

Yes one problem in debugging my system is the lack of persistent syslog files i think ill start setting that up as standard.

I did not know about magic system requests thank you both for the two very good debugging suggestions!

  -- Regards Andreas