On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 10:53 -0700, Wendell Nichols wrote:
> My fedora 10 laptop routinely "freezes". That means the menu's and
> applications don't respond to mouse clicks. After a few seconds (or
> sometimes many seconds) it frees up and works normally again. If I look
> at the cpu consumption graph I can see that something had the processer
> pegged at 100% but what? during the episode there is no way to switch
> to top or the ksysguard process list because the system is
> unresponsive. So how do I find out what caused the lockup?
> wcn

Wendell,

There are a few options here but probably the easiest is to set top
running with a long(ish) time between updates -- something like "top -d
30". When your laptop unfreezes, go to the top window and see what's
been sucking CPU.

-Chris

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Wendell Nichols wrote:
> My fedora 10 laptop routinely "freezes". That means the menu's and
> applications don't respond to mouse clicks. After a few seconds (or
> sometimes many seconds) it frees up and works normally again. If I look
> at the cpu consumption graph I can see that something had the processer
> pegged at 100% but what? during the episode there is no way to switch
> to top or the ksysguard process list because the system is
> unresponsive. So how do I find out what caused the lockup?
> wcn

Here's a possibility.

$ while true; do date>>time.log; ps g -f --sort=utime,stime | head -n 3
>> time.log; sleep 1; done

As root, use renice to set the process to run at high priority;
it might help. Perhaps you'll need to use nice in the loop to
force things to run.

That file will grow fairly rapidly, so you might want to set up another
one to delete the file once an hour or day or so. You may want or need
to tweak the number of lines you capture, and how often it runs.

When an "event" occurs, you could kill the process, and

$ tail -n 24 time.log

to see the last 6 entries. To look at other entries, you could use
something like

$ tail -n 40 time.log | head -n 24

if you've got a few at the end to omit. The example shows you
what happened 10 seconds ago. This might save time loading
it into a text editor or whatever.

$ tail -n 80 time.log | less

Might be good. Anyway, once you've got the data, you'll think
of ways to proceed.

Crude, but it may get you what you want.

You got the suggestion to run top, but running top in batch mode
results in a very rapidly growing log file, possibly too rapidly.
I don't know of a way to limit the output top produces.

Mike
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Mike McCarty wrote:
> Wendell Nichols wrote:
>
>> My fedora 10 laptop routinely "freezes". That means the menu's and
>> applications don't respond to mouse clicks. After a few seconds (or
>> sometimes many seconds) it frees up and works normally again. If I look
>> at the cpu consumption graph I can see that something had the processer
>> pegged at 100% but what? during the episode there is no way to switch
>> to top or the ksysguard process list because the system is
>> unresponsive. So how do I find out what caused the lockup?
>> wcn
>>
>
> Here's a possibility.
>
> $ while true; do date>>time.log; ps g -f --sort=utime,stime | head -n 3
> >> time.log; sleep 1; done
>
> As root, use renice to set the process to run at high priority;
> it might help. Perhaps you'll need to use nice in the loop to
> force things to run.
>
> That file will grow fairly rapidly, so you might want to set up another
> one to delete the file once an hour or day or so. You may want or need
> to tweak the number of lines you capture, and how often it runs.
>
> When an "event" occurs, you could kill the process, and
>
> $ tail -n 24 time.log
>
> to see the last 6 entries. To look at other entries, you could use
> something like
>
> $ tail -n 40 time.log | head -n 24
>
> if you've got a few at the end to omit. The example shows you
> what happened 10 seconds ago. This might save time loading
> it into a text editor or whatever.
>
> $ tail -n 80 time.log | less
>
> Might be good. Anyway, once you've got the data, you'll think
> of ways to proceed.
>
> Crude, but it may get you what you want.
>
> You got the suggestion to run top, but running top in batch mode
> results in a very rapidly growing log file, possibly too rapidly.
> I don't know of a way to limit the output top produces.
>
> Mike
>
Thanks everyone for your input. In the end I did a:
while [ 1 ]
do
date
ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -k 1 -r | head -10
sleep 2
done

I ran that script with its output redirected to a log. My machine then
acted up (badly) and I was able to see that udevd was using 50% (one
whole core) and a bunch of kde apps were unusually elevated ... in the
12-20% area. The machine ran like that for half an hour and finally
thermaled off. I had to cool it with a fan to get it restarted!
To make a long story short it seems to happen when I plug my blackberry
in to charge! I've seen some chat around the net and the fault is
probably with the berry_charge module.
I will find an electrical socket to plug that piece of junk into... (its
only working function is to prematurely terminate conversations anyway).
Thanks again...
wcn

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On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 13:42 -0700, Wendell Nichols wrote:
> To make a long story short it seems to happen when I plug my
> blackberry in to charge!

It seems silly to use a $1000 computer to charge up something, instead
of a $20 battery charger.

Considering that so many things use USB incorrectly (e.g. expect full
power without negotiation, expect to be able to draw more current than
the spec allows, etc.), I really dislike self-powered USB devices, and
despise things that use USB merely as some sort of power supply.

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