Re: that X/Gnome lockup thing. How to trace it?

[Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu>]

> In my local Linux user group, I mentioned that my RH 6.1 system was
> locking up. I'd never had a lockup in linux for 3 years, until Gnome
> 1.2.1 made its appearance.  Several people chimed in with the same
> complaint.  Then I put it together with the mentions of lockups in this
> list and I started to wonder if the problem might be widespread.

Repeat after me. Lock-ups are _NOT_ the fault of GNOME. If something 
locks up COMPLETELY it is either 'X' or 'Linux' itself - It could be X 
itself dying but locking up the keyboard and mouse - Or it could be a 
kernel problem, obviously.

This is beyond the scope of GNOME. You can't tell the developers 'GNOME 
is locking up my system. Please Help Me' because they have no idea of 
knowing what is wrong with your system.
 
> The symptom as I see it is that the system locks up suddenly, nothing
> works. The mouse does not respond, Alt-control-backspace does not work. 
> A reset button is the only solution.  I've associated the problem with
> heavy RAM usage, when the RAM and swap are near full.

Aha! This explains it. Linux is not graceful /AT ALL/ with Out-Of-Memory 
(OOM) situations. If you run out of RAM _AND_ SWAP your are basically 
screwed. 

There are various patches out there that try to improve this (one of 
which is the killing of random processes). 

I assume you are using the 2.2.x stable series (if you are using 2.4.xtest*
series - then that is your own fault - and you SHOULD expect your system 
to lock up).

> This problem happened to me only on a P-166 with 64 meg RAM. I do not
> see it on other systems that have 128 and 256 meg ram, respectively.

Try installing another swap partition. I have 64MB of RAM with 256MB of 
SWAP - so if one partiton gets full - the other is still free (actually, 
128MB has worked fine for me also  - but several times I've encountered 
'run-away' programs that try to eat all memory available - so having 
256MB gives me better change of killing them before they render my system 
OOM (and I've found in one case it fills up the 1st swap partition but 
doesn't fill up the second one - so I find that my system is still 
responsive thanks to the second swap)


Ali Abdin