Arch Linux

abstrakct

Member

Registered: 2009-07-28

Posts: 35

Everything randomly crashes / hangs

Hello and thank you for taking the time to help me out here.
I have a desktop computer with Arch. For the past several years I've been experiencing random crashes where my entire system is totally hung up. I can't do anything and have to do a hard reboot. For a while I was able to SSH into the box and do a soft/proper reboot, and those times it seemed like it was xorg was the culprit. Lately though, when the computer crashes I can't even SSH into it, doesn't answer to pings etc. Nothing to do but hard reboot.

Now here's where it might get interesting. I'm using LVM2 to combine several physical volumes into one large logical volume. On this volume (which spans 2 whole disks + 1 partition on a 3rd disk) I have an XFS filesystem. I use this for all my digital hoarding needs and general storage of stuff (music, movies, tv, etc). Back in May, one of the disks started failing so I took the entire volume offline until I could afford new disks. From that point on and all summer I don't think I had one single crash. If I had, it was very rare. The computer could run 24/7 for weeks with no problems. Now, early September I bought new disks, moved all my data and got all my LV online again. That took a while, but no problems. But I'll be damned, it didn't take many hours after having my LV back online before the computer started randomly crashing again. AAAAARGH! I could also mention that during the summer, when my giant LV was offline, I did very very little torrenting, and very little downloading with sabnzbd. But of course when I had my storage space back, I started torrenting and "sabnzbd'ing" again. The crashes are totally random and unpredictable, I haven't been able to find any pattern, except that sometimes they seem to correlate with torrent-related things, e.g. starting a torrent, so I recently switched from transmission-daemon to rtorrent, and for a few days that seemed to have a positive effect, but today everything crashed again.

Any ideas? It seems to be related to the LVM/XFS volume?!

Some specs and info:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 cpu
12 GB RAM
Kernel 3.16.3-1-ARCH
Xorg 1.15.2-1
Catalyst-total 14.4-23 (Radeon HD 5400 something something cheap graphics card)
XMonad 0.11-6 with various statusbars made with dzen/conky
transmission-daemon or rtorrent usually running in the background
sabnzbd and sickbeard usually running in the background
mpd usually running in the background
everything else running in the background is fairly vanilla I think.

Let me know if you need any other information to help me out here. I haven't personally been able to find anything in the logs that would indicate the reason for the crashes.

Thanks again for any help in figuring this out! It's getting very frustrating!

Last edited by jasonwryan (2014-09-28 16:55:11)

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Everything randomly crashes / hangs

Modern Linux (or any OS for that matter) really should never crash, which leads me to think it's a hardware issue. Main culprits would be RAM and video card I think. Have you done any tests with something like SystemRescueCD?

abstrakct

Member

Registered: 2009-07-28

Posts: 35

Re: Everything randomly crashes / hangs

I haven't really done any tests like that, but that sounds like a good idea. I was starting to think it might be a hardware issue myself.

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Everything randomly crashes / hangs

you should definitely check your hardware for issues first

But if you only get crashes when using LVM2+XFS it could just as well be some serious bug with either LVM2 or XFS or something that only happens when you use both.
Random crashes that often happen when starting torrents (which tends to be IO heavy), also sounds a lot like filesystem issue to me.

even if 'linux should never crash' there will always be bugs that might get unnoticed for ages, especially if you're running some relatively uncommon combination like LVM2 with XFS.