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i_magnific0

Member

Registered: 2012-01-23

Posts: 9

[SOLVED] System freeze on "heavy" wifi load

UPDATE: I would say that the problem for me is now sort of solved. I switched the miniPCI card with an Atheros AR9382. I have zero problems anymore. Because this happened under Windows (though far less often) as well I think this was hardware related. The linux driver perhaps made it worse.

I have been experiencing random system freezes. A suspicion has grown that my wireless adapter might have something to do with this.

These freezes will completely lock-up my system and nothing is written to kernel and error logs. Also magic sysrq doesn't do anything, I confirmed it works fine if the system hasn't crashed yet. Like I said they seem to be tied to, moderate to heavy, network load, this could range from dowloading a big file, downloading packages while upgrading etcetera. Syncing my Dropbox, which is a slow process has not caused these problems. It happens only on wifi and I'm fine on LAN. This happens both in- and outside X. I had to install my laptop on LAN in order to get anywhere. Now that all my other hardware is working fine, this problem has persisted.

sudo lspci -v | grep -i Network -A 10

gives:

08:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250 (rev 5e)
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250 2x2 AGN
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 44
	Memory at d2500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
	Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [d0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
	Capabilities: [e0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
	Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
	Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 64-80-99-ff-ff-5c-b6-50
	Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi

I currently run the Linux 3.5.3-2-ck, but fear this has little to do with my problems as I have been experiencing this since Linux 3.4.7-1.

If I'm missing any important information please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by i_magnific0 (2012-09-20 11:42:28)

Haikarainen

Member

Registered: 2012-09-04

Posts: 93

Re: [SOLVED] System freeze on "heavy" wifi load

Monitor your memory usage (with conky or likewise) while doing networkheavy tasks.

http://communities.intel.com/thread/25626

Might be a longshot since this is for a completely different architecture and OS, but there can totally be similarities between the drivers that cause the same problem.

i_magnific0

Member

Registered: 2012-01-23

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] System freeze on "heavy" wifi load

Thanks for the reply, I might actually not be so far fetched. I tried to recreate this with Windows today and got the same results. Although under Windows it is *way less* unstable. I had to dowload content from a local server to invoke the problem, yet it happened consistently. Weird...

Anyway, the RAM usage does not peak for me as suggested by you and the thread. It remains around 200MB, which seems very fair IMHO. I ordered an AR9382 card today, hope that will solve my problems. For the moment I use a tool called trickle to limit the download speed while upgrading my system.