Applications Hang
 

Hi,

I'm running RH9 with an Intel 800Mhz CPU and 1Gb ram. My problem started after installing mplayer, but I really don't think it is mplayer related. I have removed mplayer for now.

I have applications that hang and never open, (or at least open hours later) and it takes forever to log out. Two of the applications that I have tried are gedit and open office. There maybe others. Rebooting cures everything for about an hour or less. I can see the instances with top, but nothing much else is running or consuming CPU time.

I have tried running memtest86; nothing found.

Is there something that I can do to find out what is happening?

Help, I'm lost.
Thanks,

OpenOffice is definately a little slow to open. If rebooting cures everything then we need to dig a little deeper. First place to look is the logfiles to see if anything is coughing up some messages that require your attention.

tail -N /var/log/syslog will give you the last N lines from that logfile. also look at the messages log file in the same directory. XFree86.0.log should be looked at as well. You can tell the tail command to give you a 'live' display of your logs by using 'tail -f /var/log/<logfile>' which will show you the file as it it updated.

For speed issued you may want to look at your hard drive performance with the 'hdparm' command. Try 'hdparm -i /dev/hda' and see what it has to say about DMA usage.

I have looked at all the logs. Nothing seems out of whack.
The hard drive parms:

RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=40020624
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 0: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Okay. Next try it without the -i switch. 'hdparm /dev/hda' to see the current setup. You can do some perfomance testing with 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda'.

That being said, if you're not getting any obvious errors in the logfiles... sheesh. This could be a tough one.

Thanks for the reply. Seems my problem was more severe than first thought. I have (had) a bad CPU. I replaced it and now everything seems to work. I had to do a re-install of the software because of a lot of file corruption.