Server overloaded? Or is it a bug?

[Mike Hoskins]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Daniela wrote:
> My server doesn't respond any more. Everything crashed.

Did the system wedge hard, or did X just lockup?  Does ctrl-alt-backspace
do anything?  That will often kill X if it's misbehaving.  More
information about your hardware might also help someone spot potential
problems.

> How can I find out if this is a bug or it is simply overloaded?

You said this has never happened before...  Were you running anything or
doing anything that might coincide with the crash?  Crash may not be the
right word...  The first thing is deciding if it's really the OS, or some
application that's caused the behavior.

> I don't have much running, just KDE with about 10 programs
> on each of the 16 desktops, and a few background processes.
> This seems much, but I often have much more stuff running,
> and it is not even slow.

What's the load average look like?  Are these network or I/O heavy
programs, or just "simple" applications?

> It does respond when I ping it, but won't let me in over SSH.

Can you login locally?  Are the consoles unresponsive?  Was anything
printed on the console, particularly bright-white text?  :)

> The processor doesn't sound busy, so I suspect that the
> scheduler has gone away, or there is some bug in the kernel, or
> some system table is too small.

If the disk, network, etc. are quiet and the machine in unresponsive to
console input...  Your only option may be a reboot and a thorough
investigation afterwards.

> I would lose a lot of unsaved data if I had to reboot.

Eek.  Save often, regardless of OS.  ;)

-mrh

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