Bash lockups

[Carl Johnson]

vogelke+unix at pobox.com (Karl Vogel) writes:

>>> On Wed, 19 May 2010 16:14:52 -0700, 
>>> Carl Johnson <carlj at peak.org> said:
>
> C> I have been experimenting with FreeBSD for a while, and I consistently
> C> get bash lockups at irregular intervals when it is otherwise idle.
> C> Does anybody have any suggestings on how I could try to trace this?
>
>    1.  Get a process-table list every minute or so via cron.  It might show
>        something else running or trying to run when you have your lockups.
>        Try "ps -axw -o user,pid,ppid,pgid,tt,start,time,command".
>
>    2.  Get the PID of the bash session, and run something like this as root:
>
>        pid=12345
>        k=1
>        while true; do
>            truss -p $pid 2>&1 | head -1000 > /dir-with-lots-of-space/$k
>            k=`expr $k + 1`
>        done
>
>        This should break the truss output into 1000-line chunks and let you
>        clean out the directory before it chews up all your space.  Hopefully
>        one of the truss files will show something useful after a lockup.

Thanks for the ideas.  I keep several windows with shells open so I
don't want to trace all of them yet.  I don't even know what the
shells are doing when they lock up, so for now I'll just wait until
one locks up and then try truss to see what it is actually doing.
This happens only occasionally, so I will probably have to wait a
while.

I don't know this is actually just a bash problem since I have never
had it happen running on Linux in at least 10 years.
-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj at peak.org