[PLUG] what the hell is my computer doing?

[William Shank <wshank@mbcnet.com>]

i'm running mandrake 8. i came in this morning and my harddrive is going
nuts and the interface is completely unusable. it takes 5 minutes just to
get the screen lock prompt to accept my password. i figure it was indexing
the drive or something, but after a half hour it doesn't stop. i try to log
in at another tty, but tire from waiting for the password prompt. also,
there is an out of memory error and it says it killed a process (java -
which is probably the Forte IDE i left running). i can't get the system to
respond so i can see a process list. i finally try to reboot, (3 finger
salute) but the system continues to hang attempting to shutdown. i finally
have to reset it. 

when this has happened before, it usually slows the system down and i kill a
cron process or two and it stops the indexing. but this time was very severe
- perhaps due to limited memory available since i was running the java ide. 

can anyone tell me more about this process and how i can give it low
priority so that it doesn't lock up my interface?

thanks in advance for any help.

-chris


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