Thrashing

[Dennis J. Eberl]

<---------------  snip  --------------->


> Oh I also ran into my first Thrashing episode this weekend while in Netscape,
> anyone have any ideas about what causes it or how to stop it other that
> power-button?
>
> JJN
>
> --- Micah Valine <mvaline at buffnet.net> wrote:

<---------------  snip  --------------->

John,

I am certainly no authority on this and hope you get a better answer from
someone like Bob, but his is my experience.

1) The thrashing seems to take place only when I open a page that has a
computationally intense JavaScript whoozit. Warning: this is very
subjective, gut feel memory.

2) Powering down, which may end up being your last resort, should
only be a last resort. I did it and lost a small chunk of file space to an
fschk on the way back up.

3) If you can get a terminal open, you can kill netscape. Do a kill -9 on
the netscape libraries, not navigator itself. On my machine, again
this is highly fallible memory talking, under RedHat 6.1, trying to
kill netscape navigator doesn't work.

4) If you Netscape has seemed to take over the machine, try a
<Ctrl><Alt><Backspace> to blow yourself out of X Window.

5) If you can open a command line terminal (i.e., do a <Ctrl><Alt><Fn>,
where n = 2..6) log in as root and (a) try to kill netscape as in #3
above.

6) If that doesn't work do a

. . . ]# shutdown -r now

to shutdown and reboot your machine. If successful ,that will kill all
processes in a sensible way and not do any damage. If it doesn't work,
I'd check the man page for shutdown and see if there is a -f (as in
"force") option. If there is, try that.

7) I have had success just being patient and letting the thing thrash.
I once tried all kinds of killer keystrokes (including <Ctrl><Alt><Del>)
with apparently no result. <Ctrl><Alt><Backspace> finally worked
after patiently waiting quit a while. That magic key combination wasn't
the last I typed either; it just seemed to be the only one that had any
effect.

Note: It is hard to be patient when you see the machine thrashing, but
the alternative -- turning off the power, which I won't even list as
an option -- is bad. On has the feeling during thrashing that the machine
has gone nuts and is probably destroying all my files. Remember though
that Netscape and everything else you "see" (and a lot you don't) is
executing under the sure hand of Linux.

I'd do a <Crl><Alt><Backspace> and let the bugger thrash until it
finds it's way out. Take a walk or something. Again, hard to do.

Anyone who knows of errors in the above or has a better insight
please comment. We are here to learn.

Dennis