Cron and random freezing/lagging ?

ninmonkeys · 11-20-2004, 07:21 PM

'm using slackware 10, and when working, occasionally the system will freeze, music pauses, I can't move the mouse, or anything for a second or two, then it continues like nothing ever happened. (This happens while using fluxbox, a couple of xterms, gkrellm, xmms, and firefox, normally I run all these at once very smoothly)

gkrellm is running, and I saw the proc or sys cpu chart jump to the top, maybe there are some cron jobs running that I don't know about?

1) What could cause this?

2) I thought there was supposed to be a /etc/crontab or similar file, what I ended up finding was /etc/cron.foo, where foo is daily, hourly, weekly, or monthly. These directories just contain shell scripts.

I don't seem to have many cron jobs running, these are what came with my system

Code:

[jake@localhost: jake]$ ls /etc/cron.daily/
logrotate*  slocate*
[jake@localhost: jake]$ ls /etc/cron.hourly/
kmod*

(cron.monthly/ and cron.weekly/ are empty)

3) What log files should I check?

G67 · 11-20-2004, 07:48 PM

I get this too, but oddly it only happens on my desktop and not on my laptop or work pc??

I have yet to figure out what this is.........
I know this does not help you in any way, other than to know your no alone.

ninmonkeys · 11-20-2004, 08:58 PM

The only change in software that I can think of is maybe bluefish, or maybe firefox 1.0. I had the PR version, but I saw a post on /. saying they had problems with crashing.

Nothing appears to be crashing, just slowdown because all of my processor or many processes are started briefly. It would make sense I guess if locate was just updating it's database, but should it be that noticeable of a slowdown?

That's why I'm thinking maybe it's something else.

ninmonkeys · 11-21-2004, 02:40 PM

It happened again, and this time I know for sure the processes chard and the sys cpu *both* went to the top of the chart.

Any Ideas of what could be causing this? I'm using Slack10 kernel 2.4.26, but I didn't used to have this problem.

Any ideas of how to check if it is cron jobs doing this, or something possible bad?

jaMslack · 11-22-2004, 10:35 AM

I have the same symptoms(perhaps same problem) although I run slackware current linux 2.6.9. sometimes the kswapd0 process gets very high cpu load, dont know why and dont really know how to fix this

ninmonkeys · 11-22-2004, 01:11 PM

How did you figure out that process was the one that caused it? I know I can use top, but if I miss the "lag" It doesn't help out this problem

I checked and I have that same process running on my computer

Code:

$ ps -A | grep kswapd
    4 ?        00:00:00 kswapd

After googling, it looks like this process has something to do with the kernel not KDE.

Would a kernel upgrade fix this? This is the only problem I have with this kernel, and others say it is still recent. kernel: 2.4.26

thanks,
--monkey

mdarby · 11-22-2004, 01:14 PM

What time are your daily crons set to run?

ninmonkeys · 11-22-2004, 04:05 PM

1) I haven't set any... It's whatever is default for slack10. I thought there was a crontab, but I don't see a file, just directories with shell scripts in them. (I posted the listing above in code tags)

2) Could having "rmmod usbmouse" at boot have anything to do with it? I doubt it, but its just an idea. Right now I've been working for about 5 hours and no iterruption, but I had an interupption last night.

3) So I'm thinking it's not a cronjob, what else could it be?