Suse freezing
 

Hi,

i' ve just installed Suse 9.1 Professional but i have some problems. While i am running the KDE and moving around, from time to time the pc freezes for half a second. Nothing else shows up. For example if i' am moving the mouse that specific time, then the mouse stops and then reappears where it should be if the freeze hadn't happened.

I have a P4 2800Mhz processor and the ATI 9200SE if this would be of matter.

Any ideas???

Thanks!

are you transfering data on your HDD or CD/DVD drives?

Could be that DMA is disabled, check hdparm

The freeze occurs at random times, not only when i'm using a device but even when i'm just making circles wiith my mouse. I also hear often a beep and i don't know why. I think every time i hear a beep a message is being sent to my root account. Is this correct and how can i disabled it?
About the freezing again, i have the DMA enabled in all my devices.

Thanks!

hmmm ....

I'm curious, have you got a system monitor running, like say gkrellm ?

I'm thinking gkrellm, because you can configure it to show you Nice, System and User time, now if you seperate the graphs out, and have the program running always on top, it might show you spikes which coincide (roughly (Gkrellm seems to have a slight delay) with your "freeze" (0.5 secs is a glitch, but still, i would also be moderately concerned).

Now IF you see a spike (check CPU and Memory), something like KPM might show you what's running, and say having that on top, doing the circle thing, and observing what program heads to the top (bottom, depending how you're sorting the programs) will tell you what is causing your loss in performance.

Regarding your Setup, SuSE is a generally good distro, so i'd be reasonably confident it's not some dodgy Kernel config, they shipped with, but have you compiled your own kernel, or anything similar to this?

The problem i might see with a kernel that might illicit this behaviour, would be that your hardware is too new in some regard, and the kernel modules don't cater for this. No offence a 2800 is not latest gear, but maybe something on your Mobo is new enough to cause issues. Compiling a new Kernel might resolve the issue (though only if you configure it right).

Something else to consider is Swap space size, and memory load -> what i'm considering possible is that you have some interference on your Memory controller, ie not the right module, or a dated one (see kernel issue). I doubt there is a hardware flaw, but consider upgrading the firmware, of the Mobo, **realise that this is a little dangerous, depending on your setup**

First up though, check CPU and Memory usage, use Gkrellm to check for any spikes, and kpm (KDE software) to find any programs that are sucking the juice.

This might also tell you about your beeps, but i doubt that they are related to messages being sent to the root account. SuSE is aimed primarily for server deployment, and as such has sensible settings. Then again, they have gone to Desktop recently, nevertheless, noisy machines are never sensible. What sort of messages is Root receiving ...?

Freeze
 

Hi,

sorry for the delay but i was really busy.

Firstly, i don't have a system monitor running. I ran KPM trying to see which program uses the processor and mostly i saw in top of the list 'X', 'knotify', 'ksysguardd'.
Another thing i don't get. I saw in kpm that i'm running about 100 processes!!! I think this may play a role in the freeze. What do you say?
I took snapshots of the processes i'm running, can i post them in this forum? How i can manage all these processes that are running in the background? All of them except only a few are being started on a normal boot, how i can decide which of them are necessary?
I also took snapshots of the graphs of my processor and of my memory. Another weird thing is that the swap file is 0. I have 512 MB Ram and a swap file partition of about 1GB. Despite this i see my Ram full and the swap file empty. Why is that? I think that this may slow down the performance.

About the 'beep'. I think that messages are being sent to the root account because when i'm in using the console every time i hear a beep the system notifies me of the new message. The messages are a crap. About programs, about changes, i didn't pay attention. If you want i can post them.

Thanks!

suse 9.1 install freezing
 

I'm having the same problem. I installed the 9.1 version of suse with high hopes but it's just led to one frustrating installation attempt after another. Every few seconds the interface will completely freeze all processing, mouse and keyboard events, everything. I even started with runlevel 3 and it froze in that stated. I called Suse support and followed their recommendations, turning acpi off and starting in safe mode but nothing. Not sure what to do next, does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

hmm.. i experienced the exact same symptoms as you described except on windows. the way i solved that was to actually turn *all* of acpi, power management, plug-n-play ON and reinstall. then those momentary freezes completely went away. .. so if you haven't tried all those enabling all those features.. who knows, maybe that'll work with suse as well :D (i don't think it'll hurt because 2.6 is supposed to work with all this anyways)

i'm also trying to solve my own performance problem with suse 9.1 just being slow as hell overall and came across this which i haven't tried yet, but maybe it'll work for you too:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...index.html#534

Are the mouse and keyboard USB attached ?

Try to boot with pci=bios or pci=noapic or even noapic.
(Remark in this case it's APIC. Not to confuse with ACPI)

Do you have additional USB devices ? Did you try to
boot your system with USB devices *not* being attached.

If this does not help I recommend you to install kernel 2.6.7-rc2.
It might be that there are better drivers for your chipset.

It fixed a lot of problems I had.


How do you check your free memory ?

Be ware that Linux goes after the principle: Free Memory is Bad Memory. So
every time there is free space Linux redistributed buffers, to keep them into
memory and not to page them out to disk. So Linux tryes to
occupy all free RAM space.

How do you check your swap file size ???
I guess you have a swap partition, and not a file.

Thanks for the suggestions jimveta and Vlad-A,

I'm not using a USB mouse or keyboard but i have a USB HP printer that is working fine. I'll disconnect it and see...

About the RAM - i run KDE System Guard and there i have four graphic sensors. One for the CPU Load, one for the Average Load, one for the RAM and one for the swap file. For the memory it shows the amount that is used and the free. For example usually i get 500,000KB used and 20KB free for the RAM. I searched a little in the internet and i read that swap file is used only when the RAM is full, as you mentioned. So i tried to open many applications to force the system use the swap file, just to be sure that it is OK. That happened and so my swap file is OK. Yes, i have a swap partition.

Well, firstly i will try all the mentioned possible solutions...

I will also check the site you gave me, i think i might find something there.

Thanks a lot!