The CrunchyFrog Blog

This is probably not what you want to see on a typical UNIX system:

$ uptime
 15:07:27 up 500 days,  4:06,  3 users,  load average: 163.05, 170.70, 156.37

There might well be some powerful systems that can handle that type of load, but the one I was working on sure wasn’t coping very well. I can’t recall ever seeing such a high load average before on any UNIX system, and I almost didn’t get to see that because I was very close to power cycling the system to regain control before I was able to recover.

The problem started with an out-of-control process that began sucking up memory. The system began to get slower and slower, and I had a good idea which process was at fault. The Linux OOM (out-of-memory) killer didn’t kick in so I had to, but it was becoming harder and harder to get any response from a terminal, but I did manage to get a ps command entered to identify the likely culprit, watching the characters echo back at about the speed of a 110 baud modem connection on a noisy phone line, and eventually got results:

$ ps -C qgis u
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
dcato    20596 15.1 76.0 6185492 3088452 pts/27 D   13:42  10:54 qgis

This on a system with 4GB RAM and 6GB swap, and a few other running processes that weren’t shy about using memory either. Thankfully I caught the system at just the right time and was able to enter kill -9 20596 and kill the process without any of the same painful delay that the ps command took. I immediately typed uptime and got the results shown above.

A week or so after upgrading Firefox to 3.0.7 on my Linux system, I began running across an occasional web page that wouldn’t render correctly. At first I attributed it to poor page coding — perhaps one of those old-timers that still hasn’t learned that there’s more to web browsers than IE, or someone who mucked up their CSS and wound up with white text on a white background — but since I wasn’t necessarily in need of the information at the site, considering the Google search that took me to the site provided many more possible links, I just moved on to the next site without bothering to figure out why the page didn’t render.

Unfortunately, the frequency of pages not rendering properly began to increase to the point that I began experiencing the problem with web sites that I did need to access. Opera could render them fine, and Firefox on my Mac OS X system had no problem, but Firefox on Linux was a basket case. Even worse, Galeon and Seamonkey crashed when I tried to visit those same sites.