High hard disk activity making system unusable till reboot

[unni]

Hi friends,
This problem has been troubling me for the past two days. Whenever I do something like installing software, browsing using opera, opening torrents etc., the system kind of stops responding. I can see the hard disk activity led blinking continuosly indicating heavy swap usage. When this happens, I can't do anything but restart. Even the mouse pointer moves very very very slowly. All I can do is <Alt><SysRq><B>. The system responds immediately to that, but not for any other commands. Even <Ctrl><Alt><F1> takes ages to load. If I leave it like that for some time, KDE crashes, but still the activity continues. Is there anyway to determine what's causing this behaviour? What's worse is that yesterday this happened when I was showing off my Linux system to a Windows, but soon to be Linux, user. He came to my home to download something. We spent nearly 2 hours trying to do it via Linux, and finally did it in 5 minutes from Windows. I am using Mandriva 2007 with all the updates applied.

[freebird]

You can find what is using the hdd and memory by issueing "top" command

~$top
OR
~$htop (if available)

Note the top most app that is using the memory.I think this may be some cron job that is doing "updatedb" or like command.just find it out.

[mehulved]

What's the amount of RAM on your system? I personally found Mandriva bloated and way too slow on 256MB of RAM. But, still KDE crashing is not done.

[unni]

Originally Posted by freebird

You can find what is using the hdd and memory by issueing "top" command

~$top
OR
~$htop (if available)

Note the top most app that is using the memory.I think this may be some cron job that is doing "updatedb" or like command.just find it out.

Thanks for replying. I knew about this command before, but the problem is that when this happens, I won't be able to give the command. But after seeing your reply, I just gave the command when the system was running smoothly and saw that a task named 'klash' was using 88-99.8% CPU. So, I thought it has something to do with KDE plugins since this klash is related to flash. So, I launched Konqueror and choose Configure->Plugins. The only plugin listed was Flash 9. When I clicked OK, the problem again happened. I waited for about 10 minutes and then rebooted.

Originally Posted by tech_your_future

What's the amount of RAM on your system? I personally found Mandriva bloated and way too slow on 256MB of RAM. But, still KDE crashing is not done.

I have only 256 MB (actually 248 MB, 8 MB shared). But, I have been using Mandriva for the past 3-4 months, and was running fine for me. This problem started happening only yesterday. The programs that where present while the problem occured are:
Firefox - 4/6 times
Akregator - 3/6 times
Opera - 3/6 times
KTorrent - 1/6 times
Thunderbird - 1/6 times
I am mentioning these in the hope that it would give you guys some clue.

Another thing I noticed while typing this reply is that when I did 'ps -e' , I saw 4 instances of 'acroread' and 10-12 instances of 'kio_file' and 8 instances of 'kio_http'. The total number of tasks at that time was 115. I didn't open Acrobat Reader. So, I don't know how it started. According to 'top', now it is 85, about 3 MB RAM is free & swap usage is 320 MB.

What's the command to determine parent of a process?

[freebird]

sure does have some relation with kde apps?

[mehulved]

kiio_file and kio_http are kio_slaves. kio_slaves are required by KDE.
Try installing something like XFCE and use it for a few days and see if the crashes still go on or not?

[freebird]

i think @eddie can solve ur problem

[praka123]

@t_y_f:
that was a tough suggestion-that to install XFCE.,then I will say install GNOME-2.16-no offense but!

@Unni,
Perhaps it may help that by checking the logs logged in /var/log/ dir of your distro.may be kde too logs out its state.just check.
the normal commands you may be knowing- dmesg or "less /var/log/syslog" etc..hope it helps...
..and did u noticed the same hdd load while logged in as root or any other user?

[shantanu]

Whenever inmy life i tried using OSS .. mostly FC series i was always confused what to do in it...

and mind you errors are also mind blowing man

about three months back i installed FC5 in my pops comp. and it was running damn slow.. but the config was to high .. i dont know why...But surely its somewhat complicated ... i dont know how you guys handle linux...

[praka123]

@shantanu_webmaster:
that is a very biased answer.Fedora can be made faster,just stop the services it starts by default,sometimes fedora even starts NFS,Sendmail etc though it was not configured.I do understand that reluctance or a negative attitude definitely not going to help anyone.I hope You too

[shantanu]

yeah i agree to you ,

but sometime back . i myself was trying FC6 64bit edition.. i wanted to have a deep look to it , this time on my PC it worked just fine with Xp and vista in triple boot.. i managed myself to make resolv.conf and wvdial and all these files to DIAL-up to internet with my serial modem.. setting it up my way.. even for running MP3 it took me 10 hard days and for installing Nvidia drivers i am trying YET

but i aint saying LINUX is BAD --its just complicated.. and a windows user (means a long time windows user) might have probs in it..

Even i think after desktop opens .. that now what should i do...

the only reason for me to install linux was Python

and i just praised you OSS guys for your management with linux

[mehulved]

Linux is more simpler for us since we've spent more time on linux than windows. You'll are used to windows ways of doing things so linux's ways seem difficult. Installing 64 bit linux is a bit of a problem for now as 64 bit computing is in a nascent stage. For installing nvidia drivers you need to enable extra repositories. I don't use FC so don't know it as such, but google will help here. I am using nvidia card too without a hitch. ATI cards are a bit of a pain to install.

[praka123]

do you have fedora installed just go to the menu which controls the services..
or if u like terminal:

~#system-config-services

and stop unwanted services..
Linux is not for geeks...just that the *NIX systems want the user too be sensible.just try for urself some colourful distros like UBERYL or OpenSUse..if u want a change that is
I too laughs at one of my younger friend who finds Nirvana in obtaining cracks and warez illegal items and saying Windows is gr8-he cant tolerate Linux.but ofcourse with time he is changing his bias towards Windows.

[shantanu]

@praka123 right now i am at hospital and with my lappy and only have windows.. but i noted down the command what you wrote and will surely try it, Thanks to you for the info.

and why MODS have turned off the reutation

[unni]

One thing that I didn't mention was the fact that the problem started after installing lots (about 13 GB) of software.

Originally Posted by freebird

sure does have some relation with kde apps?

I too suspect so. Konqueror was giving me another error like
"Couldn't connect DCOP signal. Won't receive any status notifications!"

I searched and found that it has something to do with kdesvn. So, I uninstalled it. The problem hasn't appeared after that.

Originally Posted by tech_your_future

Try installing something like XFCE and use it for a few days and see if the crashes still go on or not?

Originally Posted by praka123

@t_y_f:
that was a tough suggestion-that to install XFCE.,then I will say install GNOME-2.16-no offense but!

I have KDE, Gnome, XFCE and atleast 3 other desktop managers installed in my system. So, its not a problem trying them out.

Originally Posted by praka123

@Unni,
Perhaps it may help that by checking the logs logged in /var/log/ dir of your distro.may be kde too logs out its state.just check.
the normal commands you may be knowing- dmesg or "less /var/log/syslog" etc..hope it helps...
..and did u noticed the same hdd load while logged in as root or any other user?

I did a quick check of the logs using the System Log Viewer gui. I didn't notice anything helpful. I'll check once again and come back. Right now, I am in Kubuntu. I don't think kde is logging out. If I leave the system untouched for about 15 minutes when the problem starts, kde seems to be just crashing. The window decorations dissappear, and I am not able to type anything. I've seen this when Beryl changes the window manager from KDE to its own.

Originally Posted by shantanu_webmaster

Whenever inmy life i tried using OSS .. mostly FC series i was always confused what to do in it...

I too started with FC3. But soon gave up. After sometime, tried FC4 & then FC5. In all these attempts, within one week, I would delete Linux. Then, 5 months ago, I started using Ubuntu. Soon, I moved to Mandriva and has been using it for 3-4 months. Now, I'm again moving to Kubuntu. I had been a Windows user for 3.5 years before moving to Linux. I think, from my experience, that for a long time Windows user, starting using Linux with FC is a bit too tough.

[mehulved]

Check if you aren't running out of disk space. And also do a memtest to see if it isn't a problem with RAM.

[praka123]

and you do have a swap partition?@least 600 MB

[unni]

Problem solved .

Originally Posted by praka123

and you do have a swap partition?@least 600 MB

Well, it turns out that I don't have a swap partition, not even 1 bit.

Originally Posted by tech_your_future

And also do a memtest to see if it isn't a problem with RAM.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go that far.

What happened was that I had installed Kubuntu just before the problem appeared. I had chosen the same swap partition that I had been using for Mandriva for Kubuntu also. During installation, Kubuntu said that /boot, / and swap partitions must be formatted, I said yes, and the installation went fine. Then I booted into Mandriva and the rest you know. Mandriva had fstab entry for swap as LABEL=SWAP-hdb7 swap swap 0 0. When Kubuntu formatted it, the label was changed to linux-swap. I changed the fstab entry to /dev/hdb7 swap swap 0 0 and everything is fine now.

I am still wondering, when I did 'top', why I didn't notice the entries next to 'swap' that said '0 total, 0 used & 0 free'. I looked at only the last entry which always say 200-700 MB cached. This might have given me the feeling that swap is there.
A check of /var/log/syslog revealed that kernel had killed kdeinit and kwin because of out of memory, which explains why KDE crashed.

Thank you guys very very much for helping me solve this.

[unni]

chorinjathinu nandi.

[jack// ani]

Originally Posted by unni

chorinjathinu nandi.

whats this unni??

[unni]

If you are talking about me using Malayalam here, sorry. Since the purpose of this thread was over, I thought there wouldn't be anything wrong. What I meant was "Thanks for spreading the light". In Malayalam, 'prakasham' means 'light'. The second word means 'to spread', and the third means 'thanks'. But, if you were thinking what I have just realized after reading my post from your quote, *no*. I didn't have any such intentions . I think that's the only way of writing that word (second one) in English.
For non-malayalam members: it can also be read with a different Malayalam pronunciation, in which case the meaning become 'to scratch' .