Aaron Burt wrote: > On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 06:22:38AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote: >> We have a Toshiba Satellite laptop about 2-3 years old that is heavily >> used >> every day. Most used application is a Web browser (Seamonkey) accessing >> facebook and gmail. The system keeps locking up by becoming completely >> unresponsive for several minutes at a time. When switching to a different >> virtual desktop it takes a long time for the screen to display. > What does the HDD light look like when the computer is unresponsive? > Solid-on, solid-off, mostly-on, mostly-off? > > First guess is HDD thrashing, either due to lots of swapping, or due to no > swapfile (weird, but that's how it is.) > I would keep "top" running in an xterm or console, and take a look when the > latop gets unresponsve. Hit "M" to sort by RAM usage, and watch the Mem > and Swap used/free numbers, as well as buffers. Lots of used swap and not > much buffers means too much RAM in use. > If you can't get to the "top" screen in time, look at the "load average" > immediately afterwards. If it's simple swap-thrashing, it might be > something like 2.0 5.0 1.0 (or a multiple of that), where the 1st number > (1-minute average) is medium-high but falling, the 2nd number (5-minute) is > pretty high, and the 3rd number (15-minute) is fairly low. > > Second guess is HDD problems. Install smartmontools and run > "sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda" to see if there are lots of bad/relocated > sectors or if the drive thinks it's failing. > > Laptop HDDs and RAM are fairly cheap these days (even if you don't buy at > FreeGeek.) And there's a Linux Clinic in a week, even! > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > > Rich,
The system logs may be in /var/log/syslog and not /var/log/messages as in other distributions. You may also want to look in the Xorg.0.log file in /var/log. -- Ken Stephens SV Aventura Portland, OR _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
