[Novalug] may be hardware related

Peter Larsen plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com
Fri Feb 13 16:41:23 EST 2009


On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 16:32 -0500, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 16:06 -0500, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> > i have an older system and at this time it only has 1/2 gb of ram -
> > 
> > i have had problems with freezing up when I tried to archive (.tar.gz) 4 
> > gb partitions. could this be due to too little memory?
> 
> Sounds like a valid explanation.  I think what's being tar'd has to be
> read into memory, so with that little memory and not another 4gb of
> swap...
> 
> You could find out by running "top" in a terminal while you try it.

Tar should only read in a block at a time, compress it etc. It does not
first read everything to memory and then write it out. 

To the original question - it depends on the freezing; if the keyboard
and stuff stops working too it may be bad memory. Do a memtest overnight
and see if that finds a problem. It can also be a full hard drive or
overused /tmp - but usually you will get somekind of message when that
happens; albeit your system will start acting funny if your / gets full.

-- 
Peter Larsen <plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com>
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