System hang during updatedb

Fri Jan 16 03:40:44 UTC 2004

4 times now, since mid December last year, with 3 different kernels,
my system has hung while updating the slocate database. The hang has
been at pretty much the same time (within seconds) each time.

The system is ping-able, caps lock works on the console keyboard but
the screen will not un-blank. That's the only life I can detect. There
is nothing in /var/log/messages or in the process accounting (lastcomm)
out of the ordinary.

Below is a top output I had running at the time. The system is a quad
processor Dell 6650 with 4 Gig of memory.

This top was from a kernel-smp-2.4.22-1.2140.nptl.

 04:09:01  up 1 day, 18:38, 26 users,  load average: 1.14, 0.64, 0.30
263 processes: 262 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
           total    1.6%    1.6%   12.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%  783.2%
           cpu00    0.0%    0.1%    0.7%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.0%
           cpu01    0.3%    0.3%    2.5%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   96.6%
           cpu02    0.0%    0.0%    0.7%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.2%
           cpu03    0.5%    0.5%    2.3%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   96.4%
           cpu04    0.1%    0.0%    0.1%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.6%
           cpu05    0.0%    0.1%    1.9%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   97.8%
           cpu06    0.3%    0.0%    2.3%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   97.2%
           cpu07    0.1%    0.3%    1.3%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   98.0%
Mem:  3878532k av, 2046568k used, 1831964k free,       0k shrd,  182600k buff
       818644k active,             852048k inactive
Swap: 33559768k av,  301608k used, 33258160k free                 1319920k cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
 2762 root      34  19   696  696   464 D N   6.7  0.0   0:05   0 updatedb
22530 norm      16   0  1348 1316   816 R     1.1  0.0   4:39   1 top
   19 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.7  0.0  15:42   4 kswapd
 1964 user1     15   0 88720  48M 44312 S     0.5  1.2  21:01   7 netscape-bin
17050 user2     25  10 10336 7232  6016 S N   0.5  0.1   3:21   1 rhn-applet-gui
  270 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.1  0.0   0:10   5 kjournald
  274 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.1  0.0   1:03   2 kjournald
  881 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.1  0.0   0:22   6 nfsd
  928 root      15   0  1640 1472  1348 S     0.1  0.0   7:04   7 amd
 1073 root      16   0  5588 3264  3228 S     0.1  0.0   0:42   2 httpd
 9832 user2     16   0  2096 1596  1544 S     0.1  0.0   0:50   1 fam
17051 root      16   0   524  500   456 S     0.1  0.0   0:08   1 pam_timestamp_c
    1 root      16   0   504  476   452 S     0.0  0.0   0:17   2 init
    2 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 swapper
    3 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   1 swapper
    4 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   2 swapper
    5 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   3 swapper
    6 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   4 swapper
    7 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   5 swapper
    8 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   6 swapper
    9 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   7 swapper
   10 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:07   3 keventd
   11 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:10   0 ksoftirqd/0
   12 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00   1 ksoftirqd/1
   13 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00   2 ksoftirqd/2

-- 
Norman Gaywood, Systems Administrator
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia

norm at turing.une.edu.au            Phone: +61 (0)2 6773 2412
http://turing.une.edu.au/~norm    Fax:   +61 (0)2 6773 3312

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