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yuliang · Aug 9, 2002, 01:28 AM

In the past month, my OS X system has crashed at least once daily. For the first year of using OS X, I could brag about how stable it is and etc, but now I really don't know.

By the way, I am running 10.1.5 with all the latest patches. It's a PowerBook G4 550 with 512 MB RAM.

Well first of all, these aren't really "crashes" in the strict sense, but we might just as well call it crashes. Here's what happens, I am switching between apps or launching a new app, and the computer would go into a permanent hang, where the beachball would spin forever and processes would screech to a halt, while the hard drive spins non-stop. I have waited upwards to 20 minutes in some instances before I'd force reboot.

While it's "hanging", I could still login from remote terminals using SSH, but the response would be extremely slow. The command prompt will show up about 2 minutes after username/password, and every subsequent command takes minutes, if ever. It would be nice to be able to use "top" thru this and kill some proccesses, but I can't even do that.

I haven't not found a specific app to blame either, but mostly it happens when I have a lot of apps open, maybe about 15? It has happened during launches of Photoshop, Palm Desktop, iTunes, Terminal, IE, Mozilla, etc, so I don't see any patterns. Therefore I am assuming this is the OS's fault.

For the past 3 weeks, I have had to force reboot the machine at least once a day. I have not been able to troubleshoot and find the culprit.

Has anyone experienced this or know any possible symptoms?

Man, I can't wait for Jaguar. Hope that lives up to the hype.

ZnU · Aug 9, 2002, 04:30 AM

How much disk space is available? OS X does very bad things if it needs to swap to disk and there's no space.

If that's not the problem, it's probably flakey hardware or a corrupt OS installation.

Aussie John · Aug 9, 2002, 04:48 AM

Sounds like a memory thing

If you have more than one RAM chip take out one and see if it stops the crashing ( or the other one).
Also run the hardware diagnosic software that comes with the mac.

trash80 · Aug 9, 2002, 05:32 AM

well if you can log into it do a ps -ax (i think - not at home so i can't remember exactly the syntax) and kill some of the apps, that might regain control for you. (kill by using the kill command of course)

moss514 · Aug 9, 2002, 05:44 AM

Originally posted by Aussie John:
Sounds like a memory thing

If you have more than one RAM chip take out one and see if it stops the crashing ( or the other one).
Also run the hardware diagnosic software that comes with the mac.

I agree, sounds like a ram issue. Do what this guy says

yuliang · Aug 9, 2002, 09:51 AM

I checked the RAM using the Apple Diagnostic test and TechTool Pro, and neither reported any problems. Plus, the RAM chips ran fine before this month.

These RAM chips are also the same speed and type. PC133 3-2-2

10.2's coming out soon so I don't think it's worth my trouble to install a fresh 10.1 system.

About the hard drive, I have about 2 gigs free...

sigh, this sucks

Chuckmcd · Aug 9, 2002, 09:58 AM

Originally posted by yuliang:
I checked the RAM using the Apple Diagnostic test and TechTool Pro, and neither reported any problems. Plus, the RAM chips ran fine before this month.

These RAM chips are also the same speed and type. PC133 3-2-2

10.2's coming out soon so I don't think it's worth my trouble to install a fresh 10.1 system.

About the hard drive, I have about 2 gigs free...

sigh, this sucks

have you run fsck in single user mode? I know that's kind of an obvious solution, but the only times X slows down or acts funny for me is when the disk has an error on it. I have exact same configuration and i've been running all those same apps.

typoon · Aug 9, 2002, 09:59 AM

Runs some utilities SW like norton and Disk Warrior. Run these from either a seperate OS 9 partition or from a Repair CD you make up. It should fix several problems. I do this all the time when OS X seems flaky and it seems to fix it. Also check the RAM you could have a bad RAM chip there. Pull them out one by one and see how it works then you will know.

yuliang · Aug 9, 2002, 02:54 PM

I did the fsck -y while booting into single user mode, by holding down cmd-S at startup, no errors in the hard drive.

Disk Utility, DiskWarriror, Norton, TechTool Pro and Drive 10 found no errors....

raviruddarraju · Aug 9, 2002, 03:45 PM

Try to see when the crash is happening by monitoring the memory consumption. You said this happens with too many apps, so it might be some kind of mem/vram issue. Keep a top open from your remote login, and open another remote login from where you can kill stuff. Then start opening apps, and notice the memory consumption in top. Now, if OS starts crying the moment you consume off all the RAM, then it has to be some kind of motherboard problem with your system not being able to deal properly with ram->vram.
I don't know though, this is my opinion.

IonCable · Aug 9, 2002, 05:02 PM

I would also look at any hacks and mods you've done to the system. I put a theme on my system and had about 5 KPs in a week until I got rid of it. Check what apps you have running all the time like Desktop Console I've heard can cause problems for some.

(s)macintosh · Aug 9, 2002, 06:40 PM

Sounds like your TiBook's been KellyHogan'ed...

King Bob On The Cob · Aug 9, 2002, 07:40 PM

I've never tried it but if you keep escape pod (Done by Ambrosia) up in the background, hitting ctr-alt-delete (backspace) you kill the topmost app (Which because of UNIX and it's nice values is the one that's allowed to eat up the CPU power) I donno. It may be worth a try.

Big Mac · Aug 10, 2002, 01:11 AM

Originally posted by raviruddarraju:
Try to see when the crash is happening by monitoring the memory consumption. You said this happens with too many apps, so it might be some kind of mem/vram issue. Keep a top open from your remote login, and open another remote login from where you can kill stuff. Then start opening apps, and notice the memory consumption in top. Now, if OS starts crying the moment you consume off all the RAM, then it has to be some kind of motherboard problem with your system not being able to deal properly with ram->vram.
I don't know though, this is my opinion.

ravir, just to clarify, you're talking about a virtual memory issue, correct? I think you're right - this sounds virtual memory related. The original poster stated that there's a lot of disk thrashing going on, and that means an abnormal amount of paging. OS X should not act in the manner you're describing no matter what the load. It sounds like a clean install is in order. I know I wouldn't put up with such terrible performance. (On a side note, you may want to check your disk fragmentation level.)

bradoesch · Aug 10, 2002, 04:52 PM

I had some bad memory once that only malfunctioned when the computer was running too hot. If I kept it cool, or removed the bad RAM module, the computer ran perfect again. Might be something to consider. . .

Brad

Telusman · Aug 10, 2002, 05:55 PM

Originally posted by bradoesch:
I had some bad memory once that only malfunctioned when the computer was running too hot. If I kept it cool, or removed the bad RAM module, the computer ran perfect again. Might be something to consider. . .

Brad

Well, Apples diagnostics are nice, but Symantecs are better, when your running disk doctor, are you doing a surface scan? I know my iMac did this a lot and low and behold there were multiple bad sectors on the disk. If OS X is attempting page to, or read from a bad sector on the drive, its very possible it would cause a hang like this as it attempts to recover the data ( most unix's have automatic sector recovery where it will attempt to write the data elsewhere.)

I think it would be worth waiting for 3 hours as a full surface scan completes. Perhaps it might show something interesting. Also, it would be worth it to see how many pagefiles have been created, Swapfile0 swapfile1 etc. When i had OS 9 installed i used to delete the pagefile every once in a while to give the system a fresh start, this can also be done in single user mode so long as your rebooting directly aftewards.

As far as i know, if there is a 1, 2. 3 or more swapfiles, OS X will page to them all, not just one. What apps are running? Ive seen a few apps go run-away, like Fire has done once or twice, is there a common app running when this happens, as in, is there one app that your running every time this happens (other than the finder) Whats your CPU usage? Whats using it? Is it a user level process like IE or is it the window manager, or the kernel tasker?

these are all questions worthy of asking before looking for a hardware solution.

- TelusmanX