[mythtv-users] System hangs occasionally

[Dick Steffens]

Another occasion occurred. Here's the top few lines of top as it appears 
frozen in a terminal window on my desktop machine:

top - 06:14:00 up 5 days, 14:28,  2 users,  load average: 1.00, 1.01, 1.05
Tasks: 166 total,   2 running, 164 sleeping,   0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 50.2%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 49.7%id,  0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  
0.0%st
Mem:   2016896k total,  1892676k used,   124220k free, 7600k buffers
Swap:  2061308k total,   332452k used,  1728856k free, 1336528k cached
Write failed: Broken pipe
rsteff at ENU-1:~$ PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+  COMMAND
  2810 rsteff    20   0 3050m 241m  17m S  101 12.3 7903:53 mythfrontend.re
  1117 mysql     20   0 1334m  35m 3456 S    0  1.8 6:14.35 mysqld
  2127 mythtv    20   0 1685m  25m 6588 S    0  1.3 46:14.56 mythbackend
  2296 rsteff    20   0  343m  23m  20m S    0  1.2 69:44.43 compiz
     1 root      20   0 24460 1692  776 S    0  0.1 0:00.40 init
     2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0 0:00.03 kthreadd

Now I'll go down to the living room, reset the machine, and follow 
Saul's recommendation to run tail -f /var/log/messages.

After a power down/power up the machine came up. I logged in but did not 
start up the front end. I came back up to my office and tried

tail -f /var/log/messages

tail: cannot open `/var/log/messages' for reading: No such file or directory

I looked in /var/log and did not find messages. Googling found that 
Ubuntu dropped /var/log/messages since everything that went there went 
also to syslog. I tried

tail -f /var/log/syslog

and found only stuff from when I restarted the machine. I tried

cat /var/log/syslog.1 | more

and found the last entry before the machine hung:

Nov  6 06:09:01 ThinkCentre-M58p CRON[13623]: (root) CMD (  [ -x 
/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/ph
p5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin 
+$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete)

The next line is

Nov  6 16:01:08 ThinkCentre-M58p kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = 
/proc/kmsg started.

which is, obviously, when I restarted the machine.

Does the line at 06:09:01 tell me anything about the hang? It was 
several minutes before the hang at 06:14:00, and the last program 
reporting in top was mythfrontend.re.

Any recommendation on other logs to look in?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens