System Crashing and Heavy Load display

[Marper]

Hi all,

Just making some observations of some problems I've had over the past month with my install.  I was originally seeing the Core lock up about every hour, then it began locking up ever 20 or so minutes.  I did some research in trying to track or diagnos the issue and stumbled on KDE System Guard.  System guard on the core displays:

    a.  Extremely heavy and consistent load
    b.  physical memory is almost exhausted (1.6 out of 2Gb) and
    c.  CPU load is at about 92%.

My core is as follows:

0710 RC2  (no other software on system)
MOBO - ASUS P5N-D
Mem - 2Gb
HDD -  Maxtor 320GB (boot),  (2) WD 500GB (data, video, pics)
Video - XFX 8500GT  PCIE
DVD - Philips w/lightscribe
NET - (2) TrendNet 10/100/1000 etho

I have about 80 DVD's ripped to this core:

Maxtor drive has 120 Gb free - about 20 DVD and photos
WD -1 180 - about 20 DVD
WD -2 260 - about 11 DVD

Since my boot drive appeared to have enough space, I did not think that it would be a disk problem.  However, just last night, I copied all of the DVD's on the boot disk to the other two disks WD, and have seen a reduction in the adverse affects.

1.  The system has not locked up for 24 hours.
2.  System resources, if KDE SysGuard is correct are somewhat normal - by that I mean Physical memory is still nearly exhausted at steady 1.6Gb, CPU load is more steady, however a large number of MAX spikes, overall load is exhibiting the same as the CPU.

Now what's really troubling is that the system is sitting "idle".  No MD's connected (all turned off and not on net), no Internet connectivity.  The core is now standalone not doing any work.

Q.  In KDE SysGuard - Does physical memory really mean physical ? I don't see any swap, but don't understand why it consuming so much.

Q.  Is there any hints anyone can give me as to where to look to try and troubleshoot ?  Searched KBU and the net and have yet to find any good info.

thanks

[totallymaxed]

Hi all,

Just making some observations of some problems I've had over the past month with my install.  I was originally seeing the Core lock up about every hour, then it began locking up ever 20 or so minutes.  I did some research in trying to track or diagnos the issue and stumbled on KDE System Guard.  System guard on the core displays:

    a.  Extremely heavy and consistent load
    b.  physical memory is almost exhausted (1.6 out of 2Gb) and
    c.  CPU load is at about 92%.

My core is as follows:

0710 RC2  (no other software on system)
MOBO - ASUS P5N-D
Mem - 2Gb
HDD -  Maxtor 320GB (boot),  (2) WD 500GB (data, video, pics)
Video - XFX 8500GT  PCIE
DVD - Philips w/lightscribe
NET - (2) TrendNet 10/100/1000 etho

I have about 80 DVD's ripped to this core:

Maxtor drive has 120 Gb free - about 20 DVD and photos
WD -1 180 - about 20 DVD
WD -2 260 - about 11 DVD

Since my boot drive appeared to have enough space, I did not think that it would be a disk problem.  However, just last night, I copied all of the DVD's on the boot disk to the other two disks WD, and have seen a reduction in the adverse affects.

1.  The system has not locked up for 24 hours.
2.  System resources, if KDE SysGuard is correct are somewhat normal - by that I mean Physical memory is still nearly exhausted at steady 1.6Gb, CPU load is more steady, however a large number of MAX spikes, overall load is exhibiting the same as the CPU.

Now what's really troubling is that the system is sitting "idle".  No MD's connected (all turned off and not on net), no Internet connectivity.  The core is now standalone not doing any work.

Q.  In KDE SysGuard - Does physical memory really mean physical ? I don't see any swap, but don't understand why it consuming so much.

Q.  Is there any hints anyone can give me as to where to look to try and troubleshoot ?  Searched KBU and the net and have yet to find any good info.

thanks

When you say 'locked' do you mean the Orbiter freezes and no remote/keyboard/mouse inputs are accepted? If yes can you still ssh into your from another computer? If you can ssh in then that would indicate that the nVidia driver may be crashing X... try doing the following after ssh'ing into your core;


top <return>

Do you see Xorg using a large amount of processor? If yes then this is usually down to the nVidia driver... but in some cases can indicate that there is a fault on your nVidia card (I have seen this recently with my 6200TC card in my Core... would work fine for a period then would lock my Core... swapped ig for a 7300GS and all is fine again).

Hope this helps

Andrew

[tekoholic]

I may have a similar problem, to that of the OP.  However, my core does NOT have an Nvidia card.  It ran great for the first several days, UI2 kickin' right along (no alpha, of course).  Then, all of a sudden, the system froze (I believe I was booting up a new MD when it happened, but cannot remember for sure).  When it came back up, UI2 would NOT initialize.  Changed to UI1, runs fine.  Changed back to UI2, and it regen'd all the screens, got to gui, and froze a few seconds later (ONLY the gui, and I believe X server, as I could still ssh in).  Still cannot seem to find a fix, as yet...

HP Pavilion a6317c
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 (2.2Ghz)
360GB SATA HDD
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100

lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 SATA RAID Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 30)
01:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Agere Systems FW323 (rev 70)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)

[Marper]

TotallyMaxed - Thanks.  Prior to your post, I decided to move the DVD's I copied to the drive with the O/S to another drive within the system.  That appeared to level the system out, Memory, System Load all dropped to very low levels from 90-95% usage to about 45%.  I did not get a chance to do any additional work until this weekend, when I loaded another 20 DVD's to the Cores HDD and almost immediately the system load shot up to a consistent 95% utilization.  However, I have not seen the system crash as yet. 

I think I mis-quote my video card, it is a XFX 8500, although my MD is a 9600 NV.

I'll be tearing down the system this week to do more testing, thanks for your sugesstions, if it freezes I'll try your recommendations and report from there.