Sorry if this stuff is obvious, but I just had to troubleshoot my
freezing winXP machine (turned out to be a buggy driver pulled from
windows update- a subsequent update a few weeks later fixed it), so I've
been thinking about this a bit recently.
The first thing you should probably do is check if there's an error
being logged anywhere to give you a clue about what's wrong. If not,
the best thing is probably to do a binary search by process of
elemination- come up with a set of things that could possibly be causing
the problem, disable half of them, and use the system for a while and
see if the problem occurs. Once you've determined which half the source
is in, lather, rinse, and repeat. Though, depending on the frequency of
the problem and how usable the system is with half the suspects
disabled, this method can be a bit of a pain...
-Derek
J. Milgram wrote:
Any good techniques for diagnosing system freezups? My box occasionally,
at random intervals, locks up while grabbing mail with fetchmail, so
suspects are sendmail, procmail, my spam filter (simple python script
with file locking), and fetchmail itself. And probably a dozen other
things.
thanks for any ideas...
Judah
