Strange bug freezing my laptop

[Julien Olivier]

On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 21:58, Arnaud Abelard wrote:
> > Hi guys.
> 
> Helllo,
> 
> >>>From time to time (rather randomly), my CPU gets used at 100% (at
> >> least,
> > my laptop's led blinks a lot), my mouse works (I can move it but not
> > click) but not my keyboard. Then, about 30 seconds later, even the mouse
> > stops moving and I have to hard-reboot my laptop.
> 
> Doesn't look like a CPU consumption but more like a memory problem... have
> you tried monitoring your memory usage? (even with the system monitor
> applet) If you aren't working as root on your laptop you could use
> pam_limits to limit your memory usage (and see what process gets killed by
> using too much memory) or keep an eye on a top sorted by memory usage.
> 

As I said in a previous email, the bug seems to have gone when I removed
the notification area from the panel. If it happens again, I'll also
watch my memory usage.

That said, the notification area could have had a memory leak.

> Could be an acpi problem, lots of laptops are acpi only, disabling acpi
> might damage them (CPU overheat, etc)... can you tell your laptop's
> getting hot? who knows... the fan might not run as often as it should, but
> then if RH8 was running fine...
> 

I had a problem with my CPU a few weeks ago. It was stuck. I managed to
repair it and now it works fine. The laptop doesn't seem to over-heat.
More over, I could reproduce the bug with or without ACPI, and with or
without APM. So I don't think it's ACPI or APM-related.

> my bet is a memory leak.
> 

I'll watch that. Thanks for the tip.

> Bien le bonsoir ;-)
> 

A toi aussi :)

-- 
Julien Olivier <julo at altern.org>