"Hemmann, Volker Armin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Tue, 16 May 2006 20:27:21 +0200:
> So I bet it is a) the ram b) overheating of the CPU or c) your PSU. > In that order. > > bzip2 needs a lot of CPU power, so overheating could be the reason. > Overheating or undervolting, as soon as it has an increased load. I'll second that. I've experienced bunzip2 issues before due both to over-clocking and to memory issues. Most recently due to memory issues, due to some generic memory I had. bzip2 is high compression, which stresses the CPU. It can also stress memory with larger tarballs. One characteristic of good compression is that the compressed form appears random -- no duplication or pattern visible, or further compression is possible. In such a situation, transmission or storage errors become possible and the reliability of the data is thus suspect. To account for and counteract this, bzip2 performs a pretty intensive integrity check. If your computer has unreliable parts, memory, CPU, etc, bunzip2 is very often the canary in the coal mine in terms of spotting them, due in part to this intensive integrity check and its sensitivity to memory or CPU errors. Despite the fact that you don't provide the specific errors, which could have been quite useful, I'd lay money on the problem being unreliable hardware, either CPU or memory. If it's possible with your motherboard, declock one or both a notch or two. Here, the memory error I had at the rated PC3200 (DDR-400) entirely disappeared when an upgraded BIOS gave me the ability to declock the generic memory from 200 (doubled to 400) MHz to 183 (doubled to 366) MHz, from PC3200 to PC3000 equivalent. At the lower speed, the system was rock stable. Likewise in an earlier generation, when I was overclocking my (then Athlon-C) CPU from 1.2 to 1.33 GHz. For about a year and a half, I ran Distributed.net, thus 100% CPU on the overclocked. It ran fine, but it DID shorten the life of my CPU, such that at about 18 months in, I started getting various errors and ended up declocking back to 1.2 GHz. Even there, however, I had to keep the increased voltage, as the system was no longer stable without it, and even with the increased voltage, still wasn't absolutely stable. It was while I was on that system that MS put out eXPrivacy, and after waiting literally years for an NT based full 32-bit system, I realized I couldn't accept the privacy and other compromises that MS was demanding. As a result, there was simply no way I could legally run eXPrivacy, because I couldn't agree to the EULA or the authentication scheme. Fortunately, I had been scoping out Linux for some time and ensuring all the hardware I purchased was Linux compatible, so I upgraded to Linux rather than go illegal with MSWormOS eXPrivacy. I've never looked back, but one thing I DID find out right away was that the system wasn't stable enough (due to my previous overclocking) to reliably do certain things (including using bunxip2). Fortunately, I had chosen Mandrake, a binary distribution, so it wasn't as bad as it would have been on Gentoo, but I got used to having to redo things like bunzip2 calls 2 or 3 times to get them to work properly. I switched to AMD64 (and to the previously mentioned problem with generic memory) before I switched to Gentoo. Fortunately, the problem with the memory wasn't as bad as yours seems to be, but I still had to babysit emerges, and do some of them several times over to finish them successfully, until that BIOS upgrade gave me the ability to declock the memory just that one notch, and one notch made all the difference! So... Try declocking your system, either memory or CPU. Something's not running stable. If you can't or doing so doesn't help on amd64, chances are you'll have difficulty with x86 Gentoo on that computer as well, unless you can do the compiles on other x86 computers and just do the binary package thing on that one. Even then, if it won't do bunzip2, since the binary package thing uses bzip2 packages, you might be out of luck. If you can't declock something, you are most likely looking at either a memory replace or a CPU replace to get reasonable stability. Unfortunately... but that's dealing with real life, and I have the real life experiences demonstrating the fact. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
