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Re: [PLUG] what the hell is my computer doing?
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On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 09:40:21AM -0400, William Shank wrote:
> 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?
Short term solution : get the cron job that's indexing to play
nice. Use "nice" (isn't Unix clever?). I'm guessing that your
/etc/crontab has something like
# m h dom mon dow user command
25 6 * * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
47 6 * * 7 root run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
52 6 1 * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly
in it. The indexing is probably being done by a script in the
/etc/cron.daily directory (/etc/cron.daily/find). Just stick
something like "nice -n 10" in front of run-parts on each line.
You might also consider moving back the start time so that there
is a higher liklihood that its done by the time you get to it in
the morning.
Of course, the long term solution would be to figure out why it
gets _so_ hosed. I've not seen updatedb (called by
/etc/cron.daily/find) kill processes or gasp for air before.
I've seen it complain about missing samba mount though. You
might want to collect some snapshots of your system state to
figure this one out. Drop "top -b -n 1" and "ps axfu" into a
script, have it invoked before and after run-parts starts it's
thing and compare that output (emailed to you by cron). Can
anybody offer better ways?
Greg
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