Thrashing

JJ Neff jjneff at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 10 14:27:58 EDT 2000


The "thrashing did occur while I was responding to e-mail in Yahoo mail.  So
many pages were open in Netscape.  It came on slow and then when I tried to
click away , vroooommmm the hard drive was off to the races.  As you stated
nothing seemed to break it.  I couldn't move mouse, no key combos worked, and I
couldn't Ctrl-Alt-F1.

What just hit me though was I have other machines on Lan, I should have been
able to go to my NT server and telnet to my DEBIAN box.  Then command a
shutdown or kill the Netscape service.  That never occured to me while I was in
front of the machine.  I know this doesn't help those with one box, sorry. I
may have to try to upgrade my Netscape also as James suggested.

JJN  
--- "Dennis J. Eberl" <dje at pcom.net> wrote:
> 
> <---------------  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
> 
> 

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