I guess it may be hard, if not impossible, to answer my question here, given the limited amount of information I have, but I was wondering if anyone had any idea of what might have gone wrong with my Gentoo...
Basically what happened was this: One day I noticed I couldn't log into my Gentoo box through SSH (or so I thought -- I could get contact, but when time came for validation of my keys etc. nothing happened for a loooooong time, so I gave up after a few tries). I assumed this had to do with a power outage at the university, that I'd been hearing about. However, when I visited my box in person, it was up and running with the same session as last time -- no booting had occurred. At first it seemed as if X had frozen, but in retrospect I suspect things were just going extremely slowly. I managed to kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but still things were incredibly slow. I ran top to see if there were any processes hogging CPU, but I couldn't find any. After a while I got frustrated at waiting for minutes for commands to execute, so I rebooted the machine, and now it seems to be working perfectly. But it is a bit unnerving to know that this sort of thing might happen again... So... Given that I have no info (anymore) about what processes were running etc., I suppose finding out what was going on is a bit difficult (to say the least), but any insights would be appreciated. For example, are there any cleanup operations that could be done automatically and scheduled with cron? Could I have used something other than top (e.g. ps with some magic switches) to find out what was going on? When things slow down extremely such as this -- are there other likely causes than some process (or processes) hogging CPU and/or memory? Thanks, - M -- Magnus Lie Hetland "Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist." http://hetland.org -- Indiana Jones -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
