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#1 2011-05-01 16:22:49

sweisman
Member
Registered: 2008-05-20
Posts: 42

Recent unstable behavior problems. Stumped.

I'm not a newbie, but I am stumped, and I hope you don't mind me posting here.

I've been using Arch continuously since 2004, and my current install has been migrated to several drives and mobos since 2006 or so.

Several months ago, the capacitors on my 2007-era Intel board clearly failed, and the entire board stopped working. This board had a few minor glitches (the front USB ports didn't work, mainly), but otherwise was extremely reliable and stable until the bitter end.

I would sometimes get to out-of-memory conditions because I would have too many tabs open, but there was a clear boundary and it was fairly easy to keep within it.

I upgraded to an Asus mobo, using the same Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and drives.

I like this board a lot better in many ways. The physical layout is much cleaner. However, one deficiency is only having two DIMM slots (the Intel had four). I now have one 2gb stick from the old mobo and one new 4gb stick got, to be able to get better advantage of x86-64 (I'm still at i686, but will upgrade when I have some time) when I finally do migrate.

However, right now, with just a typical tab collection open, and memory use at the 50% level (comfortably below the margin of OOM), the system is wildly unstable. Tabs just stop responding and take a LONG time to die (this is Chromium). Console tasks will run but often not work, for no sensible reason.

When I kill the browser, and memory usage goes to almost nothing, commands then work as expected.

I only just remember the memory issue when writing the above. So, I guess I should first ask, is it possible the two sticks together are unstable (memtest86+ went through several tests with no errors)? I will try removing the 2gb to see what happens.

Since the instability seems memory usage related, this seems the most likely issue.

I'm posting this anyway, but I will get back to this.

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#2 2011-05-01 16:33:58

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: Recent unstable behavior problems. Stumped.

Running memtest for a few passes isn't going to tell you a whole lot if the system seems to be stable at first. I had instability with my last motherboard/RAM combo and memtest would only find the failures after 10+ hours of running. I recommend running it at least that time if you suspect hardware issues.

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#3 2011-05-01 17:14:56

sweisman
Member
Registered: 2008-05-20
Posts: 42

Re: Recent unstable behavior problems. Stumped.

I am now running with just the one 4gb stick and things are noticeably better. Sorry for the post, but it did help me figure out the problem, as the RAM hadn't even crossed my mind until writing it.

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