Fedora 15 Crashes After a Few Hours

[jeditom]

Hi All,

I've recently moved from Ubuntu (after moving from Gentoo and Arch) to Fedora 15 and am experiencing some crashing.

What happens is after a few hours or not particularly hard usage (web browser, a couple of terminals, maybe having run a few Ant scripts etc) all the fans seem to go into serious overdrive. I can't move the mouse and the system doesn't respond to any keyboard input. After about five minutes of this, the fans slow down but the system remains unresponsive. I've left it for a further 30 minutes, still nothing so I have to do a hard reset.

My hardware is a stock laptop Compal IFL90. Besides the standard installed software, the only other things I've installed are;

- Sun JDK (and Eclipse, but not running during crash)
- Pogo Plug software (pogoplugfs which is started on login)
- Cryptkeeper for my encfs stuff
- Opera

Can anyone point me to a possible fix, or let me know what other information is needed to try and get more complete support? It's not to much of a problem at the moment, but when I start using my laptop more frequently, having to power cycle every few hours is going to make is to difficult to use.

tom@ifl90:~$ uname -a
Linux ifl90 2.6.38.6-27.fc15.i686 #1 SMP Sun May 15 17:57:13 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Cheers,

Tom

---------- Post added at 08:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:03 AM ----------

Okay, so I powered my laptop up to post this topic, and I've just had to do a hard reboot because of a crash/unresponsive system.

So that means my laptop lasts about an hour before it needs rebooting, which is clearly frustrating. (I've not had this problem with any other distro).

The only thing I had running this time was Firefox, I'd also had a couple of terminals open, one running a very noddy Perl script - that the script had finished without error before the crash. Also, this time the fans didn't go crazy.

Oh, and I've also for the NVidia drivers installed.

Does anyone have any idea what I can look for to diagnose this?

[stoggy]

check the basic stuff first.

free, top. does it get hot? try turning it on for an hour and do nothing. Try from command line only.

[jeditom]

Well, the laptop doesn't get hot to the touch, at least not beyond what I would consider "normal". It's certainly no warmer to touch than when running under different distros.

Unfortunately, there's no way to predict when it's going to die, so other than have a memory/cpu/process list up and visible all the time. I can't get that kind of information. Maybe that's what I'll just have to do. Run top and wait for the inevitable...

---------- Post added at 02:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:11 PM ----------

Okay, so after your post I ran top and left it ontop of my other windows and waited for a crash. I didn't have to wait long. This time, as the time before last, the fans didn't go crazy my laptop just stopped responding to all inputs.

Although, interestingly I've noticed that the network light flashes slowly when everything else is not responding. I still have to do a hard power cycle though. Here's the some of the top output during the crash. I can't see anything wrong with it though. Obviously I had to use a pen/paper to copy it...

Uptime: 2:27
Load Average: 0.19, 0.12, 0.13
Tasks: 146, 1 Running, 146 Stopped
CPUs 6.3%, 6.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 86.7%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Memory 3095624k, 1365392k used, 1730232k free, 115260k buffers
Swap: 3116604k total, 0 used, 592548k cached

|VIRT    |RES  |SHR  |S|%CPU  |%MEM  |TIME   |CMD            |
|398m    |292  |20m  |S|19.9  |9.7   |3:41.03|opera          |
|118m    |29m  |14m  |S|2.3   |1.0   |1:59.10|operapluginwrap|
|83716   |30m  |7128 |S|1.3   |1.0   |2:23.72|Xorg           |
|425m    |89m  |30m  |S|1.0   |3.0   |2:07.71|gnome-shell    |
|76356   |18m  |10m  |S|0.3   |0.6   |0:03.40|gnome-terminal |
|2740    |1024 |780  |R|0.3   |0.0   |0:07.3 |top            |

Anything there look out of place? Any in particular I should be looking in the logs for?

Any help would be very gratefully received, obviously having a laptop that hangs every couple of hours isn't a usable system!

Cheers,

Tom

[stoggy]

does it lock up if your not in X? just trying to isolate the problem...
Are you on a network? Can you ping it when its unresponsive from another machine? ssh to it?


check in your logs just before it starts booting. that would be where it locked up before.