2011/3/1 Peter Humphrey <pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org>: > On Tuesday 01 March 2011 23:14:12 Mick wrote: > >> Ha! I remember on an old machine when in WinXP would rarely if ever >> crash, while in Gentoo would crash every time. > > My machine is only about a year old, built by a specialist builder of high- > performance systems, so it shouldn't be experiencing hardware failures. > >> Different OS' use memory differently. > > Indeed they do. My experience is the converse of yours: Gentoo does not > hang, while Fedora and Mandriva do. It's not a problem with a particular > area of the disks, as I've installed them both in different partitions and > got the same result. I assume that some kernel options don't suit my > motherboard. Don't all laugh, but it's an Asus P7P55D. > >> After a year or so though the WinXP installation eventually corrupted >> itself irreparably, while Gentoo (on reiserfs) soldiered on. Eventually, I >> bought new memory modules and there were no more crashes. > > Maybe I need to replace the memory. That's a bit drastic though when I > haven't actually proved it faulty.
Yes, I tend to agree. You could end up replacing the memory only to find out that the crashes persist. >> memtest 86+ showed no errors, so I didn't know what to blame for all >> these crashes. > > It's well known that test programs can't stress a computer the way real life > does. It was true of Ferranti Argus 500 systems in 1974, and I'm sure it's > still true today. I remember using a script which put the system (memory modules and swap) through its paces. That did show me some errors which made me replace the memory. I can't recall where I found that script, but remember it being aired in this mailing list. >> After close observation I discovered that the machine would crash the >> moment it tried to start swapping. > > Interesting. As far as I can tell though this box doesn't swap often - it > can go weeks without doing so. As I said the other day, my 4GB is enough to > contain the work I usually do. > >> This would typically happen in the middle of an emerge, which was rather >> annoying, and/or when updatedb was running. > > At least you could re-run an aborted emerge; when my box hangs it just stops > responding to keyboard and mouse, and the network interface stops receiving > packets so I can't ssh in from another box to shut it down neatly. It's BRS > time. No I couldn't. :-( The whole system would freeze up, no keyboard, no network, no nothing. I had to pull the plug every time. -- Regards, Mick
