Severe instabilities and system lockups

[Chris Whitehouse]

David Jackson wrote:
> I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with 
> FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly 
> locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. 
> Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for 
> minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 
> hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the 
> USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes 
> unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by 
> severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 
> systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not 
> happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when 
> accessing disk.
> 
> Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on 
> USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has 
> anyone else seen these problems with USB disks?
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> 
Don't ask me to fix anything because I have no idea, but I have seen 
this occasionally on one usb port and/or using a usb extender cable (I 
haven't tested properly yet) on my home desktop system. So I put it down 
to a hardware issue. All other ports work as expected. Is it an external 
hard drive, as opposed to pen drive etc? Have you tested with the 
supplied cable plugged directly into a usb port (no extender cable) 
including with the secondary power cable if it has one? Have you tested 
all your usb ports? Have you tested on other machines running FreeBSD? 
Finally, given your remark about windows 98, does your motherboard 
actually have USB 2?

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p1

regards

Chris