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From: Gero Putzar on 31 Mar 2010 22:10
Hi,

I am running Lenny on a computer that is used remotely as number cruncher
and as a work station at the same time. Now for the second time the desktop
login (gdm) has become very slow or virtually stopped accepting input. The
mouse pointer is still moving but very very slow and there seems to be no
reaction on keyboard input.

It looks pretty similar to when the load is too high, e.g. when it's
swapping all the time or the root partition is full, but that's not the
case.

I can still login via ssh and everything is fine through that channel. Using
'top' I see that the computer is basically idling. I can't find anything
suspicious in the log files.

I stopped and restarted gdm via ssh, no change. When gdm is stopped, the
text console does not accept input from the keyboard either. I did an init 1
and still the text console doesn't work. A complete reboot works. Everything
is working fine now.

The computer runs permanently (also hosting some network services). Last
night I had it run some memory and cpu intensive jobs and when I wanted to
log in the morning, it didn't work.

I can't experiment very much with it, I need it running. And anyway I have
no idea how to trigger this behaviour on purpose. If you have any idea how I
could get a clue or what I could look at when this happens again, please
give me a hint.

The computer is a HP workstation, 2 Xeon quadcores, 32GB RAM if that
matters.

Thanks, Gero.


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From: Ron Johnson on 31 Mar 2010 23:30
On 2010-03-31 21:04, Gero Putzar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am running Lenny on a computer that is used remotely as number cruncher
> and as a work station at the same time. Now for the second time the desktop
> login (gdm) has become very slow or virtually stopped accepting input. The
> mouse pointer is still moving but very very slow and there seems to be no
> reaction on keyboard input.
>
> It looks pretty similar to when the load is too high, e.g. when it's
> swapping all the time or the root partition is full, but that's not the
> case.
>
> I can still login via ssh and everything is fine through that channel. Using
> 'top' I see that the computer is basically idling. I can't find anything
> suspicious in the log files.

Memory? Excess swappage?

No, you already mentioned that...

> I stopped and restarted gdm via ssh, no change. When gdm is stopped, the
> text console does not accept input from the keyboard either. I did an init 1
> and still the text console doesn't work. A complete reboot works. Everything
> is working fine now.
>
> The computer runs permanently (also hosting some network services). Last
> night I had it run some memory and cpu intensive jobs and when I wanted to
> log in the morning, it didn't work.
>
> I can't experiment very much with it, I need it running. And anyway I have
> no idea how to trigger this behaviour on purpose. If you have any idea how I
> could get a clue or what I could look at when this happens again, please
> give me a hint.

What if you stop gdm and just have the bare Elder Days console login
prompt? Get your GUI by running "startx".

If you can easily log in from the bare console, that might tell you
something.

> The computer is a HP workstation, 2 Xeon quadcores, 32GB RAM if that
> matters.

Heat maybe frazzling something?

There are daemons that can log SMART and CPU temps to syslog. Maybe
there's also something like that for your video card.

--
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak
or the timid." Dwight Eisenhower


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From: Jon Dowland on 1 Apr 2010 08:30
On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 10:04:51AM +0800, Gero Putzar wrote:
> It looks pretty similar to when the load is too high, e.g.
> when it's swapping all the time or the root partition is
> full, but that's not the case.

What about IO load (the 'wa' figure for Cpus in top(1)).
There might be an IO intensive job?


--
Jon Dowland
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