DSL is 99% Excellent!
Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL is 99% Excellent!
started by: camzmac
Posted by camzmac on Feb. 08 2005,01:03
DSL is a great system, but I just have one thing that is really bugging me.Whenever the CPU usage hits 100%, there seems to be a chance that the system will become unresponsive. Especially when Firefox is open and/or an MP3 is playing in Firefox.
The machine I'm on has a 400 mHz Pentium II processor with 128 MB of RAM (plenty in my opinion, rarely gone past 50% used in DSL), and when I was in Wind0ws the system crashed a total of 1 time(s). (on the exact same computer) And most of the time I have no problem listening to MP3s while surfing with Firefox under Wind0ws. When I am under DSL, however, I've never been able to go for longer than an hour doing this without the system crashing. DSL has crashed at least 30 times on me since I first got it in November (and this is my first Linux OS I've ever gotten).
Of course, when I tried it on a 1.67 gHz machine it was almost impossible for it to crash.
But I think it would be an excellent idea to have something in DSL that limits how much of the CPU a process can take up, so that the chances of crashing are much lower.
Thank you for reading this.
EDIT: Oops, didn't see the "DSL Ideas and Suggestions" forum, it should probably be moved over there...
Posted by AwPhuch on Feb. 08 2005,02:20
Perhaps its time to start looking at the hardware for faults...Your RAM might be failing, your CPU fan might not work or is clogged and when the cpu usage peaks to high levels the CPU gets hotter, without proper cooling it will make the cpu run erratically which will lead to lockups...
Get a utility cd called < Ultimate Boot CD >
| Quote |
| Ultimate Boot CD (Basic) The basic version contains updated versions of all tools found in previous releases and even adds a few more. This version does not contain the Linux boot environment INSERT. Name of Tool Version Hard Disk Installation MaxBlast 3 (Maxtor) 3.6 DiscWizard 2003 (Seagate) 10.45.06 Disk Manager (Seagate) 9.56a Disk Manager (Samsung) 10 Hard Disk Diagnosis Drive Fitness Test (IBM/Hitachi) 4.00 PowerMax (Maxtor/Quantum) 4.09 DLG Diagnostic (Western Digital) 4.15 DLG Diagnostic (Western Digital) 5.04c Data Lifeguard (Western Digital) 11.0 SeaTools Desktop (Seagate) 1.06.02 SeaTools Desktop (Seagate) 3.00.07en Diagnostic Tool (Fujitsu) 6.20 SHDIAG (Samsung) 1.25 HUTIL (Samsung) 1.19 GWSCAN (Gateway) 3.15 GWSCAN (Gateway) 5.09 Salvation HDD Scan and Repair 3.0 MHDD32 4.0 Ontrack Data Advisor Free Edition 5.0 Hard Disk Device Management Feature Tool (IBM/Hitachi) 1.94 AMSET (Maxtor) 4.00 MAXLLF (Maxtor) 1.1 UATA100 (Seagate) 3.06 Ultra ATA Manager (Western Digital) June, 2003 SMARTUDM 2.00 ATA Password Tool 1.1 ATAINF 1.3m Hard Disk Wiping AutoClave 0.3 Active@ KillDisk Free Edition 3.1 Darik's Boot and Nuke 1.0.4 PC INSPECTOR e-maxx 0.95 Build 775 Hard Disk Cloning HDClone (Free Edition) 2.0 g4u 1.17 PC INSPECTOR clone maxx 0.95 Build 769 XXCOPY 2.85.9 Hard Disk Sector Editor Disk Editor 3.0 DISKMAN4 4.01 PTS DiskEditor 1.04 Partition Tools Ranish Partition Manager 2.44 XFDISK (Extended FDISK) 0.9.3beta SPFDISK (Special FDISK) 2000-03q TestDisk 5.5 Partition Resizer 1.3.4 Partition Saving 2.91 Free FDISK 1.3.0 MBRtool 2.2.100 MBRWork 1.07b FIPS 2.0 Active@ Partition Recovery 2.1.1 Boot Managers Smart BootManager 3.7R1 Gujin 0.9 GAG 4.5d XOSL 1.1.5 File Managers DOS Navigator 4.9.0 File Maven 3.5a NTFS Tools Offline NT Password & Registry Editor Note: The SCSI drivers are available on the CD in scsi/. Selecting "[a] autoprobe for the driver" on startup should do the trick. 041205 Active NTFS Reader for DOS 1.0.1 EditBINI 1.01.1 Boot Partition 2.50 System Burn-In Test Lucifer 1.0 CPU Test CPU Burn-in 1.00 Mersenne Prime Test 23.5.2 Memory Test Memtest86 3.2 Memtest86+ 1.40 Windows Memory Diagnostic n/a DocMem RAM Diagnostic 1.45a DocMem RAM Diagnostic 2.1b TestMem4 4 ctramtest 5.1 Peripherals Test Parallel port detection and test utilities 1.45 ATAPI CDROM Identification 2.03 CPU Information Intel Processor Frequency ID Utility 7.2.20041115 System Information AIDA16 2.14 NSSI 0.58.6 PC-Config 9.33 ASTRA 4.21 PCISniffer 1.3 PCI pcidevs.txt: 21 Nov 2004 0.49B CTIA 2.1 Benchmark Applications System Speed Test 32 4.78 3D Benchmark VGA 1.0 CPU Benchmark n/a CD Index 1.1 BIOS Utilities BIOS 1.35.1 UniFlash 1.38 WipeCMOS 1.2 CMOSPWD 4.4 !BIOS 3.20 DOS Boot Disks FreeDOS Boot Disk 3.22 NwDsk: NetWare Boot Disk 3.22 Madboot Floppy 8.0 MSRRC: Bart's Network Boot Disk on FreeDOS 3.22 Antivirus Tools F-Prot Antivirus for DOS (Personal use only) Virus definition: 16 Jan 2005 3.16a McAfee Antivirus Scanner Virus definition: 12 Jan 2005 4.32.0 Avast! V7.7 for DOS Virus definition: 18 Jan 2005 7.7 AntiVir Personal Edition Virus definition: 18 Jan 2005 6.29.0.5 Network Tools Freesco 0.3.2 Arachne WWW Browser 1.79 QNX Demo Browser (network and modem version) 4.00 NetCopy 0.2 DOSRDP 2.0/XP Disk Image Tools Disk Image Writer Original work by Adrian Stanciu. Writes disk images on UBCD to physical floppy disks. n/a |
Now dats alot!!!!
Brian
AwPhuch
Posted by Nico on Feb. 08 2005,06:46
Do you run DSL as live cd or as installed system from your hd?When running as livecd its clear to me what happens:
As you know, DSL is running completely in your RAM. Now, when running some larger apps (like Firefox and Xmms) on your 128mb, the time will come and your RAM is full. Imagine your Firefox puts much stuff into cache, i.e. all your surfed pages and pictures.
When your RAM is filled up with this stuff and you want to play the next mp3 (i.e.), the system can crash. Like in any other os. But any other (installed) os does have swap space or like Windows a swap file. Thats why this does not happen when you are running your windows.
To let your DSL run more than 1h, clear your firefox cache from time to time. Do this from the firefox-menu or the brutal way: delete the ".mozilla" folder in your home folder.
Posted by ke4nt1 on Feb. 08 2005,06:50
Also, setup a bigger swap partition, or a swapfile, if you don't have enough ( or any)
This will allow your computer to 'virtually' have more ram
than it physically does..
Setting your firefox cache to a lower setting , like 5k or so
will greatly reduce it's memory usage as well..
73
ke4nt
Posted by hawki on Feb. 08 2005,13:09
HiDoes your system really crash or freeze? There is a difference. I have an old Compaq that freezes up on occasion. It just locks up with the screen frozen. I chock it up to a hardware problem I haven't found yet. Linux uses the hardware in a much different way than W@@!!. That same system won't even boot if I don't use the noapm option at boot time. I think it is because Compaq uses some odd features for power management. Anyway you might try noapm nousb and a few other options to remove some stuff that you don't use.
Good luck
Posted by camzmac on Feb. 08 2005,23:06
Ok. Thanks for your help everybody. I noticed I have been using Crash/Freeze/Lock interchangably. What I really mean everything stays still and what's on the screen when it freezes is still there (basically it becomes unresponsive)And I know what a swapfile is, I don't have one set up but it crashes even before it hits 50% used.
Also, I'll try that Firefox cache-control tip.
Thanks again, you've all been very helpful. My Linux experience has been very pleasant so far (and not to mention fun).
Posted by LaptopNewbie on Dec. 20 2005,21:51
Hi,I've inquired on this before, but thought I'd chime in. When booted from USB, my DSL 1.5 absolutely does not turn on the cooling fan on my laptop. This was true on my Compaq NC610c and is also true on my HP/Compaq nc6220. This will definitely cause the machine to "freeze" (sic) from overheating within 1 hour. I don't know why the fan does not come on under DSL, but it doesn't.
Posted by reidar on Dec. 31 2005,09:39
I encounter the same issue as described above on my laptop. This is a Compac Evo 600n (if I recall correctly). It has 1 GHz processor and 385 MB RAM. I have had Debian Sarge, Ubuntu Hoary/Breezy on it, and everything worked fine. With DSL 2.0 frugal install (toram option) though, the fan appears to be turned off. So, whenever the CPU reaches 100%, the machine takes a little "thinking break", and it hangs, i.e. the mouse doesn't follow along, and applications doesn't respond untill the CPU usage goes down again. Perhaps this is a problem with Compac laptops? Or has anyone using a different kind of laptop experienced the same issues?Now, with my laptop this is only a minor annoyance. It is a quite powerful machine, and it doesn't happen all the time. But it still is somewhat annoying. If you guys find out something more, or know a possible solution to the problem, I would like to know! In my case at least, I am quite certain that it is not a hardware related issue, as everything works fine with other systems (like Debian/Ubuntu) on the same machine.
-r
Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 31 2005,20:15
Does it behave differently between a DSL livecd bootup vs. a USB frugal bootup?If so, open up the syslinux.cfg on your pendrive and compare the settings between it and the /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg file on the livecd.
Maybe there is an apm or acpi cheatcode that is missing (or should be removed) from one version or the other.