Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!grr
From: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com (George Robbins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec
Subject: Re: DS3100 Hangs - Any Ideas Why?
Message-ID: <9712@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 18 Feb 90 13:47:01 GMT
References: <8331@bunny.GTE.COM>
Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (George Robbins)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 30

In article <8331@bunny.GTE.COM> dcr0@GTE.COM (David Robbins) writes:
> 
> My DECStation 3100 has the annoying habit of occasionally becoming
> thoroughly hung...
> is to reboot.  I am wondering why, and I thought I might ask the net-folk
> if anyone has observed similar symptoms and has figured out what's going on.
> 
> The problem is seemingly random, although it usually occurs when I am doing
> some heavy compiling.  The machine will be humming along, banging away at
> the disk and generally keeping itself busy, when all of a sudden it becomes
> eerily quiet.  No response to the keyboard or mouse, no disk activity, no
> response to the Ethernet -- it is as though the CPU has simply halted with
> no way to bring it back to life.

There have been a number of reports about perverse DS3100 behavior when there
is a lot of paging/swapping, process creation and not a lot of memory.  It
seems possible that some of your compilations could be sliding into this mode
since the MIPS compiler can do an impressive amount of dancing around your
source in an attempt to generate optimized code.

Of course it could always be a hardware problem - the only effective way to
test this would be to borrow another unit and do your thing there.

How much memory do you have?  If you could beg/borrow/buy another module or
two and that made the problem go away, it would point at Ultrix problems...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)