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Topic: DSL is 99% Excellent!, except one thing...

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camzmac

Group: Members
Posts: 22
Joined: Nov. 2004

Posted: 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...

--------------
Signature last updated: 04/02/2005

AwPhuch

Group: Members
Posts: 1404
Joined: April 2004

Posted: 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

--------------
http://www.frappr.com/dsl <-- Where do you use DSL?
http://www.smoothwall.org <-- Ultimate firewall for the world!
http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php/userID:6107 <--My BOINC stats!
./S99LinuxRevolution start

Nico
Unregistered

Posted: 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.

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: 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

hawki

Group: Members
Posts: 175
Joined: Jan. 2004

Posted: Feb. 08 2005,13:09

Hi

Does 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

8 replies since Feb. 08 2005,01:03

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