[ILUG] Hanging System!

[Rik Dunphy]

Cormac McClean wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running SuSE 6.4 on a PII, 64MB RAM.  It's great,
> except for the odd time the system crawls or completely
> hangs, particularly if I've been away from it for a while;
> the screen saver moves very very slowly, if at all, and
> there seems to be an inordinate amount of disk activity.

How long is a while?
And what Mhz is the CPU?
Does this only happen after booting up?

SuSE by default runs a cronjob at 12 midnight which is meant to update
the locate database. If it didn't run at the alloted time it runs the
next time you boot up. This explains the thrashing.

You can see this as a 'find' job when you do a ps -ae when the disk
trashing occurs.

I've seen serious thrashing of CPU performance on a PII450 with 64Mb of
memory, almost to the point of stopping. I've never experienced it on my
K6/2-500 with 128Mb of memory.

> Each time I've been running the same sort of stuff: on the
> desktop (KDE version shipped with SuSE 6.4) I'm running
> Netscape and StarOffice and a few konsoles; I'm also running
> a web server and other services.

On a 64Mb machine these two will eat away your memory, and cause disk
thrashing of their own (when doing anything between them). Why not use
Staroffice as your browser/email client?
 
> I'm also going to eliminate any unneccessary services
> to see if that helps, but any advice would be appreciated.

First try removing the cron job to update the locate database and see if
that improves.

Next stop loading non-essential services. If you installed a lot of
applications (and a lot come with SuSE) then there is a chance that a
lot of non-essential services are started up. I remember installing a
lot of things thinking I'll have a look at that sometime, but lots of
services were started which I didn't need day to day such as Applixnet,
Apache, Skyrix etc...

Hope that is of use...
RikD