Re: Another lock up

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:I was in X.  All of a sudden I lost input focus, windows of my aterms in
:Window Maker changed colour when moving focus, but I couldn't type anything
:in.
:I noticed the disk thrashing like crazy.  Every once in a while I could
:close some aterms and switch workspaces and close others.
:Some dockapps were also whacked in that their static image was showing and
:where normally dynamic images are were whited out.
:After a while it even stopped reacting to the switching of the workspaces or
:closing of the aterms.  So I pressed ctrl-alt-bs, this worked to create one
:screen, no aterms, and a mouse pointer.  However, I couldn't use the mouse
:pointer any more, didn't drop to console, couldn't forcefully drop to
:console.  After the diskthrashing stopped I tried to go to DDB, also didn't
:work.
:Had to power off and on.
:
:This box is on 256 MB and uses swap quite often.  Personally I am inclined
:to say that it is triggering something in the VM system along with IO.
:However, I am totally at a loss at what it could be, since I am unable to do
:anything about it to gain more information.
:I did enable console.log and all.log in case something MIGHT be printed on
:console and thus I am able to capture it.
:
:Ideas/hints/tips?
:
:-- 
:Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono

    It definitely sounds like a thrash related issue... actually, it kinda
    sounds like the X server might have been killed or something.  I'm hoping
    that it's that and not an actual system freeze.

    What I suggest is that when the situation starts to happen, ctl-alt-Fn
    out of X and into a console, login as root, and see if you can determine
    what the cause of the thrashing that way.

    You could also try nice'ing down all X-related programs.  If that actually
    works then we *know* it's a scheduling issue.

    We know that there are definitely scheduler issues... I think I blew it
    somewhere in the last month and it is not scheduling cpu-bound programs
    properly.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>