Hi,
Generally all I use my laptop for is web browsing and I repeatedly see the same crashing behaviour. It generally happens when I have many tabs open (like 30+) and suddenly the disk access (as indicated by an LED) will start going crazy and after a few seconds I will loose all control of the system (no response to keystrokes or to mouse movements). The only solution is to yank the power cable and start again.
If I am quick enough I can hit CTRL-ALT-M (which I have mapped to xkill) and then after a while the cursor will change to the fat x and if I still have mouse control I can move it to the offending application (usually Firefox) and click on it, if I am lucky it will then die after a while and I can continue on without having to power-cycle the laptop.
I have seen this crashing behaviour repeatedly over a couple of years on multiple versions of Ubuntu. I know it has happened with:
- Chromium
- Firefox
- The TOR Browser
It may also have happened with GIMP.
So, I would like a way to debug this. It seems there are two possibilities:
1. Run the application in some sort of 'sand-boxed' mode which would strictly limit the max resources it is allowed use. Here I am assuming that if I could limit the max amount of any given resource (RAM, disk access, etc ) that an application is allowed to use then I would never end up in the situation where the machine would become unresponsive to keystrokes/mouse movements. Then when the crash happens I could simply open a terminal and try to see what is going on or at least simply kill the offending process and continue without having to power-cycle
2. Run some script in the background to continually log key system parameters (eg the output of top) so that next time the crash happens I could power-cycle the machine and then look at the log to figure out what went wrong
So, what is the best way to proceed here ? Or indeed are there any logs which would already be created by default which could give me insights into what is happening during these crashes and how to prevent them ?
For reference I am currently running Ubuntu 14.04 but this has been happening for a couple of years now so it is not specific to 14.04, moreover it is not something that resolves itself if given enough time I have left it for ~10 hours overnight and in the morning it is still hammering away at the hard-disk and unresponsive to inputs. This is the most perplexing aspect of the problem the fact that it seems to be one application which is malfunctioning yet it take down the entire system. Historically I saw this as one of the key differences between Linux and Windows from the point of view of usability; when something on Windows crashes it takes the entire system down in BSOD style whereas in Linux it used to just mean opening a terminal and killing a process. It seems that, in Ubuntu at any rate, you can now get the full 'Microsoft experience' on Linux.
Generally all I use my laptop for is web browsing and I repeatedly see the same crashing behaviour. It generally happens when I have many tabs open (like 30+) and suddenly the disk access (as indicated by an LED) will start going crazy and after a few seconds I will loose all control of the system (no response to keystrokes or to mouse movements). The only solution is to yank the power cable and start again.
If I am quick enough I can hit CTRL-ALT-M (which I have mapped to xkill) and then after a while the cursor will change to the fat x and if I still have mouse control I can move it to the offending application (usually Firefox) and click on it, if I am lucky it will then die after a while and I can continue on without having to power-cycle the laptop.
I have seen this crashing behaviour repeatedly over a couple of years on multiple versions of Ubuntu. I know it has happened with:
- Chromium
- Firefox
- The TOR Browser
It may also have happened with GIMP.
So, I would like a way to debug this. It seems there are two possibilities:
1. Run the application in some sort of 'sand-boxed' mode which would strictly limit the max resources it is allowed use. Here I am assuming that if I could limit the max amount of any given resource (RAM, disk access, etc ) that an application is allowed to use then I would never end up in the situation where the machine would become unresponsive to keystrokes/mouse movements. Then when the crash happens I could simply open a terminal and try to see what is going on or at least simply kill the offending process and continue without having to power-cycle
2. Run some script in the background to continually log key system parameters (eg the output of top) so that next time the crash happens I could power-cycle the machine and then look at the log to figure out what went wrong
So, what is the best way to proceed here ? Or indeed are there any logs which would already be created by default which could give me insights into what is happening during these crashes and how to prevent them ?
For reference I am currently running Ubuntu 14.04 but this has been happening for a couple of years now so it is not specific to 14.04, moreover it is not something that resolves itself if given enough time I have left it for ~10 hours overnight and in the morning it is still hammering away at the hard-disk and unresponsive to inputs. This is the most perplexing aspect of the problem the fact that it seems to be one application which is malfunctioning yet it take down the entire system. Historically I saw this as one of the key differences between Linux and Windows from the point of view of usability; when something on Windows crashes it takes the entire system down in BSOD style whereas in Linux it used to just mean opening a terminal and killing a process. It seems that, in Ubuntu at any rate, you can now get the full 'Microsoft experience' on Linux.
