On Thursday 07 April 2011 21:12:27 Richard wrote:
On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 03:45:19PM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if
> an application went down it didn't take other processes with it. Sadly
> this no longer seems to be true.
>
> Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB. When I tried to save it
> it started, but then went into Disk Sleep. XSane and, believe it or
> not, Libre Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I
> could find in System Monitor. Eventually, remember previous episodes, I
> asked for a system restart. The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me
> with no option but to power down.
remember to check /var/log/messages and watch dmesg when you hit strange
problems like that, it is certainly unexpected that a 200 MB scan would
nuke your system. It might be a flaky USB drive rthat got into way or
something like that.
I knew that there is a known limit for size, but didn't expect it to be
anywhere near that low. I did the same scan again later, with the same
result. After the next reboot I did it again with 200dpi which produced a
meagre 31KB scan. That saved without a problem.
There's not much chance of monitoring anything while it is actually happening
unless I can do it from the command line in a second terminal - which I
haven't tried, but will do next time I see it. All KDE utilities seem to be
brought to the knees when this happens.
Anne
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