Crashing/lockup

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Crashing/lockup
started by: Robocoastie

Posted by Robocoastie on Nov. 05 2005,04:33

Hi all,

I have DSL-LiveCD running on an AMD Duron 900MHz with 384 MB of RAM crunching Folding@Home console Linux on a 128MB USB key.

The problem I'm having is that after about a day (full 24 hours) sometimes a little more of it crunching the system locks up. No screen display, no activity that I can see going on in terms of writes or reads to the USB key, just the computers fans spinning.

I thought at first that it may have to do with running the toram option but it happens even when run from CD.

It functions fine with OS's installed to its hard drive such as Xandros or Linspire. I even used to run Slackware on it as well way back at version 8.0 and 8.1.

Any ideas? Maybe I should try disabling the screensaver so I can rule out a problem there.

thanks,

Rob

Posted by adssse on Nov. 05 2005,04:50

Is it possible that there is a memory leak somewhere? I thought I remember hearing about xvesa having a leak. With it running in toram or livecd your amount of ram would be limited without swap. You could try keeping an eye on it to see if as it continues to run if you have less and less ram available. Let us know how it turns out and good luck.

Posted by Robocoastie on Nov. 07 2005,05:08

I bet that's what it is. The DIMMS are quite old. I'll try that tomorrow when I can a/b switch to it regularly to check out the RAM level. I guess I could even swapon the swap partition that's on the Linspire harddrive. Don't know why I never thought of that.

Posted by hawki on Nov. 07 2005,12:27

Hi
I have had similar problems. If you run top you will see that Xvesa continues to grow. To solve this I run Xfbdev instead. The problem there is that the screen saver doesn't work. To solve that I enabled "doze" mode in my bios so the hardware supplies the screen blanking.
Good luck

Posted by adssse on Nov. 08 2005,04:38

Ya I also noticed that when I ran top that xvesa continues to use more ram. I believe I saw it up to around 29% when using it the other day on my laptop. For a quick fix to get my ram back I just exited the window manager (window manager -> exit) and than typed 'xinit' to get back. That way xvesa would release my ram. Not a solution, but works pretty good for a simple fix when using my lappy which is not on 24/7