Hi Terry, > On Sunday 10 Jun 2012 11:59:23 Sean Gibbins wrote: > > Pure guesswork Terry, but my money is on Skype being the culprit > > based on nothing more than intuition and a vague notion that I > > recall reading it was a resource hog years ago. > > Well it did kick off just as my daughter's login notification came up. > But what could it have been doing for all that time?
Thrashing the hard disk, assuming you've just one, by demanding more memory, causing existing dirty RAM to be paged out to swap space, whilst at the same time wanting its own code and data to fill that new memory. Both need the hard disk and seek times on spinning rust are awful. You can alleviate this a bit by putting swap space in the middle, or at least that used to be the advice, but ideally you want swap to just accumulate unused bits and pieces slowly so it shouldn't really matter. > > Not much too offer by way of solutions, other than perhaps to see if > > it is possible to ssh in from another machine and get to a terminal > > that way? > > I'm no expert, but is that likely to have worked since the machine > wasn't responding to keyboard input? (This should have the highest > priority AFAIK). At the lowest level it almost certainly did respond, e.g. the USB packet from the keyboard, but the huge amount of work needed to turn that into a new terminal window, especially if you didn't already have any running, was held up. A network login can need a lot less memory and CPU so may have completed more quickly, though perhaps still not quick enough. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2012-06-12 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
