Desktop Freezing

zed · 03-20-2003, 12:59 PM

Hi,

I've had this a couple dozen times now, and I'm not sure what's happening..

I'm running G4 QuickSilver Desktop with 2 screens running 10.2.4.

The system is never shutdown and I remain logged in all the time...

At random times while I'm working on it the screen will freeze and nothing will update, the only thing I can do is either hard reset the computer or login using ssh from my laptop and issue:

sudo reboot

which does reboot the system, I can do anything from SSH and I can't figure out what happens to the desktop env...

Has anyone else seen this or have any ideas what might be wrong...

I don't think it's memory related as I have 1.5gb and it's not running out...

System log shows this:

Mar 20 17:46:49 falcon WindowServer[200]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbf83000 to 0xbc051000 goes out of bounds)
Mar 20 17:46:50 falcon WindowServer[200]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbf83000 to 0xbc0aa000 goes out of bounds)
Mar 20 17:49:54 falcon WindowServer[200]: CGXOrderMenuBarWindow: error ordering menuBarWindow forward 268451843

Cheers,

---Zed

mervTormel · 03-20-2003, 01:07 PM

ouch! that's all you get in the logs?

hmm, a lot of third-party menu extras? odd ones?

zed · 03-20-2003, 01:16 PM

that's all I got around the time...

I've nothing extra on the menu bar...

I've just moved all the preferencePanes out the way just incase they are doing something..

--Zed

pdm · 06-25-2003, 11:05 PM

I know this thread is old, but I'll add a 'me too'
I've been fighting with this freezing mac thing
for a year now and its getting very irritating.
No useful errors in logs, just the "Reserved range exhausted" stuff. I did note that if I login via ssh and kill all processed owned by me, the display unfreezes and logged me in fresh.

When 10.3 comes out, it'll be a 100% fresh install for me, I can't take it anymore.

jamunson · 06-26-2003, 12:58 AM

I'v lately been having a freezing problem also. I dont know if its related to this but my cursor freezes and the whole desktop is frozen. nothing will move. I have to shut down and restart from the power button. Could it be my mouse?.
Any ideas anyone?.

pdm · 06-26-2003, 09:58 AM

I don't think its just the mouse freezing, its the entire display. If I have iTunes playing, the music will continue to play but the time elapsed will not update. Neither does the menubar clock for that matter. The computer isn't frozen at all, just the display. If you login via remove with ssh you can kill off all your processes and regain control of the screen, but y ou might as well hit the power button if you are doing that anyway.

zed · 06-26-2003, 10:00 AM

Which processes do you kill that give the control of the screen back?

Do you mean that you can then use the mouse and keyboard again???

When this happens to me I end up sshing in from my laptop and then:

sudo reboot

Cheers,
--Zed

milllion · 06-26-2003, 10:18 AM

the same thing's been happening to me. similar messages in the logs but i've never been able to ssh in.

i can't remember very well, but i think the cpu gets slammed as well.

the really frustrating thing is that i can't even define a particular thing that i do that triggers it though i've suspected things like smb and ftp mounting through the finder a couple of times.

it's better than os 9 because it happens less often but i liked the honesty of the 'classic' crash.

zed · 06-26-2003, 10:20 AM

Well it happens to me when I move between screens..

mostly when I'm dragging a window between the screens...possibly when the window is below the bottom of the screen...

--Zed

milllion · 06-26-2003, 10:25 AM

i don't have two screens (poor me), so it can't be that.

it's hard to find anything about it because it's not even definable as a 'crash'. my mouse carries on moving but applications die one after another.

i think that as soon as an app has to access the hard-drive it joins the frozen gang - end of game.

there's nothing worse than a slow, inexorable, death.

yellow · 06-26-2003, 12:35 PM

Does mounted volumes on your desktop and loss off connectivity ring any bells for anyone? About the only time I encouter this is when the machine waits to time out on a mounted AFP volume that suddenly goes away.
How long has anyone waited to see if it sorts itself out?

milllion · 06-26-2003, 12:44 PM

i've waited, i've watched in morbid fascination... but probably not long enough to be _sure_ that it's not going to recover. it just doesn't feel like a recoverable state. i can understand the finder going, fine (der) but all the rest, including the screen update. that's pretty bad.

it has happened with mounted volumes but i wouldn't say that that's the only time.

just recently something similar has been starting to happen with bbedit but i'm blaming that on the horde of extras i'm hosting. still, watching mr bb reliable die is disturbing. again, i get impatient but it takes quite a few force quits to make it go away.

yellow · 06-26-2003, 12:57 PM

Well, how long is long? 5, 10, 15 minutes? 15 minutes is looong, IMO if it's not sorted out by then, it's not coming back.

Are you running our of disk space by any chance?

milllion · 06-26-2003, 01:02 PM

probably about 3 minutes. meddling all the way. not good enough eh.

disk space is no problem. i've got gigs free on the system partition.

the thing that really convinced me was not being able to ssh in. i tried everytime to pop to shell and see what exactly it was that was eating the resources (and also initiate a proper reboot) but no joy.

it hasn't happened for a while now - we can only hope. in the meantime i'm still looking for people who've had the same thing and have found out something more meaningful about what's happening under the lid.

give me a kernel panic anyday.

paulhagstrom · 07-31-2003, 05:28 PM

Just a "me too" message -- I've had several of these "total UI freezes" over the past month or so (10.2.6, Dual 1.25 G4). Usually happens when I've got the machine doing a bunch of things at once (downloading, video compression, CD burning, web browsing, email, ...).

I haven't been able to figure out what triggers the freezes, but usually when it happens, I get a immobilized beach ball (that still spins, but it is the only thing that moves on the whole screen). Not every time, but most times, I could still ssh in and everything seemed to be going normally -- all the processes were still processing, downloads were proceeding, video compression was happening, etc. My somewhat uninformed diagnosis of the problem is that the "WindowServer crashed", but I never had any success trying to bring it back to life -- is it possible to "restart" it?

I haven't had it happen since I defragged my drives and emptied them a little bit (I was running them pretty full, although usually with at least 1-2GB left free), I don't know if that's relevant. I was getting some occasional messages like "too fragmented to write" for swapfiles (!) which sounded bad enough to me to take the time offline to optimize my drives. I'll be curious to know if anyone solves this.

hayne · 07-31-2003, 06:47 PM

Quote:


	Originally posted by paulhagstrom My somewhat uninformed diagnosis of the problem is that the "WindowServer crashed", but I never had any success trying to bring it back to life -- is it possible to "restart" it?

I think that sounds like a good diagnosis. But it might not be crashed - it might just be waiting for something (that might never arrive?).

Quote:


	I haven't had it happen since I defragged my drives and emptied them a little bit (I was running them pretty full, although usually with at least 1-2GB left free), I don't know if that's relevant.

1GB is definitely very close to the edge for an OS X system. I wouldn't feel comfortable with less than 2 or 3 GB free disk space on a heavily used machine.

Quote:


	I was getting some occasional messages like "too fragmented to write" for swapfiles (!) which sounded bad enough to me to take the time offline to optimize my drives.

Did the message you get actually refer to fragmentation? I haven't heard of that being mentioned in a kernel message.

paulhagstrom · 07-31-2003, 06:58 PM

Quote:


	Originally posted by hayne Did the message you get actually refer to fragmentation? I haven't heard of that being mentioned in a kernel message.

Yep:
% cat system.log.5 | grep swapfile
Jul 25 00:06:59 Memble mach_kernel: File swapfile24 is too fragmented to save
Jul 25 00:07:16 Memble mach_kernel: File swapfile23 is too fragmented to save

Pretty high swapfile numbers too -- I bet this really was triggered by the disk running out of space. I've been trying to keep more GB free on my system drive since then.

hayne · 07-31-2003, 07:14 PM

Quote:


	Originally posted by paulhagstrom Pretty high swapfile numbers too -- I bet this really was triggered by the disk running out of space.

You would get a lot of swap files when you use lots of RAM-hungry applications. It shouldn't be related to having little disk space. But 24 swap files would take up about 2 GB of disk space - so having so many swap files would certainly excerbate your disk space problems.

atomictuesday · 08-02-2003, 12:17 AM

When the window manager freezes on me, I ssh to my machine and I kill the windowserver process. The process loginwindow will bring it back. What will happen is that all or most of your GUI based apps will be killed since they were children of the windowserver, but still you will have a workable machine. That's all there's to it. If you can't ssh to your machine, make sure that you have this feature enabled in the sharing prefs. I agree with yellow, this sort of thing happens to me when the Finder cannot access something related to the network when using AFP, and FTP. I was working on a way to resolve this issue by writing a GUI-based program which all it does is increase the number present in a file. Another process, non-GUI based and thus not affected by WM crashes, will read this number and if it finds that it is zero it kills the windowserver. Else it just writes zero to the file. I am going to finish it now that I saw this thread. If it works for me I'll bring the code. Now, paul, what I would like to know is how in the name of God you have 24 swap files. I have a mere 4 files, and they are big enough. Are you shutting down your computer too frequently? What could be causing there to be so many swap files?
Atomic

paulhagstrom · 08-02-2003, 12:29 AM

Quote:


	Originally posted by atomictuesday Now, paul, what I would like to know is how in the name of God you have 24 swap files. I have a mere 4 files, and they are big enough. Are you shutting down your computer too frequently? What could be causing there to be so many swap files? Atomic

Very good question. But aren't they cleaned up on restart or in a cron task? Or should I be cleaning them up manually?

The computer in question is generally on 24/7 except for the occasional software update or crash requiring a restart, but it's often on for weeks at a time. I've quite often run several video encoding processes in the background overnight, and it's possible that these ate up way more memory than I should have allowed them to. Hmm.

03-20-2003, 12:59 PM	#1
zed Major Leaguer Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Earth Posts: 381	Desktop Freezing Hi, I've had this a couple dozen times now, and I'm not sure what's happening.. I'm running G4 QuickSilver Desktop with 2 screens running 10.2.4. The system is never shutdown and I remain logged in all the time... At random times while I'm working on it the screen will freeze and nothing will update, the only thing I can do is either hard reset the computer or login using ssh from my laptop and issue: sudo reboot which does reboot the system, I can do anything from SSH and I can't figure out what happens to the desktop env... Has anyone else seen this or have any ideas what might be wrong... I don't think it's memory related as I have 1.5gb and it's not running out... System log shows this: Mar 20 17:46:49 falcon WindowServer[200]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbf83000 to 0xbc051000 goes out of bounds) Mar 20 17:46:50 falcon WindowServer[200]: Reserved range exhausted. (0xbbf83000 to 0xbc0aa000 goes out of bounds) Mar 20 17:49:54 falcon WindowServer[200]: CGXOrderMenuBarWindow: error ordering menuBarWindow forward 268451843 Cheers, ---Zed Last edited by zed; 03-20-2003 at 01:01 PM.

03-20-2003, 01:07 PM	#2
mervTormel League Commissioner Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 5,536	ouch! that's all you get in the logs? hmm, a lot of third-party menu extras? odd ones? __________________ On a clear disk, you can seek forever.

06-26-2003, 12:58 AM	#5
jamunson Prospect Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: San Francisco Posts: 16	I'v lately been having a freezing problem also. I dont know if its related to this but my cursor freezes and the whole desktop is frozen. nothing will move. I have to shut down and restart from the power button. Could it be my mouse?. Any ideas anyone?. __________________ jamunson

08-02-2003, 12:17 AM	#19
atomictuesday Triple-A Player Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: /dev/bpf1 Posts: 220	When the window manager freezes on me, I ssh to my machine and I kill the windowserver process. The process loginwindow will bring it back. What will happen is that all or most of your GUI based apps will be killed since they were children of the windowserver, but still you will have a workable machine. That's all there's to it. If you can't ssh to your machine, make sure that you have this feature enabled in the sharing prefs. I agree with yellow, this sort of thing happens to me when the Finder cannot access something related to the network when using AFP, and FTP. I was working on a way to resolve this issue by writing a GUI-based program which all it does is increase the number present in a file. Another process, non-GUI based and thus not affected by WM crashes, will read this number and if it finds that it is zero it kills the windowserver. Else it just writes zero to the file. I am going to finish it now that I saw this thread. If it works for me I'll bring the code. Now, paul, what I would like to know is how in the name of God you have 24 swap files. I have a mere 4 files, and they are big enough. Are you shutting down your computer too frequently? What could be causing there to be so many swap files? Atomic __________________ The True Master is the One Who Never Stops Learning.

03-20-2003, 01:16 PM	#3
zed Major Leaguer Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Earth Posts: 381	that's all I got around the time... I've nothing extra on the menu bar... I've just moved all the preferencePanes out the way just incase they are doing something.. --Zed

06-25-2003, 11:05 PM	#4
pdm Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 4	I know this thread is old, but I'll add a 'me too' I've been fighting with this freezing mac thing for a year now and its getting very irritating. No useful errors in logs, just the "Reserved range exhausted" stuff. I did note that if I login via ssh and kill all processed owned by me, the display unfreezes and logged me in fresh. When 10.3 comes out, it'll be a 100% fresh install for me, I can't take it anymore.

06-26-2003, 09:58 AM	#6
pdm Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 4	I don't think its just the mouse freezing, its the entire display. If I have iTunes playing, the music will continue to play but the time elapsed will not update. Neither does the menubar clock for that matter. The computer isn't frozen at all, just the display. If you login via remove with ssh you can kill off all your processes and regain control of the screen, but y ou might as well hit the power button if you are doing that anyway.

06-26-2003, 10:00 AM	#7
zed Major Leaguer Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Earth Posts: 381	Which processes do you kill that give the control of the screen back? Do you mean that you can then use the mouse and keyboard again??? When this happens to me I end up sshing in from my laptop and then: sudo reboot Cheers, --Zed

06-26-2003, 10:18 AM	#8
milllion Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 6	the same thing's been happening to me. similar messages in the logs but i've never been able to ssh in. i can't remember very well, but i think the cpu gets slammed as well. the really frustrating thing is that i can't even define a particular thing that i do that triggers it though i've suspected things like smb and ftp mounting through the finder a couple of times. it's better than os 9 because it happens less often but i liked the honesty of the 'classic' crash.

06-26-2003, 10:20 AM	#9
zed Major Leaguer Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Earth Posts: 381	Well it happens to me when I move between screens.. mostly when I'm dragging a window between the screens...possibly when the window is below the bottom of the screen... --Zed

06-26-2003, 10:25 AM	#10
milllion Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 6	i don't have two screens (poor me), so it can't be that. it's hard to find anything about it because it's not even definable as a 'crash'. my mouse carries on moving but applications die one after another. i think that as soon as an app has to access the hard-drive it joins the frozen gang - end of game. there's nothing worse than a slow, inexorable, death.

06-26-2003, 12:35 PM	#11
yellow Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 10,677	Does mounted volumes on your desktop and loss off connectivity ring any bells for anyone? About the only time I encouter this is when the machine waits to time out on a mounted AFP volume that suddenly goes away. How long has anyone waited to see if it sorts itself out?

06-26-2003, 12:44 PM	#12
milllion Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 6	i've waited, i've watched in morbid fascination... but probably not long enough to be _sure_ that it's not going to recover. it just doesn't feel like a recoverable state. i can understand the finder going, fine (der) but all the rest, including the screen update. that's pretty bad. it has happened with mounted volumes but i wouldn't say that that's the only time. just recently something similar has been starting to happen with bbedit but i'm blaming that on the horde of extras i'm hosting. still, watching mr bb reliable die is disturbing. again, i get impatient but it takes quite a few force quits to make it go away.

06-26-2003, 12:57 PM	#13
yellow Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 10,677	Well, how long is long? 5, 10, 15 minutes? 15 minutes is looong, IMO if it's not sorted out by then, it's not coming back. Are you running our of disk space by any chance?

06-26-2003, 01:02 PM	#14
milllion Prospect Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 6	probably about 3 minutes. meddling all the way. not good enough eh. disk space is no problem. i've got gigs free on the system partition. the thing that really convinced me was not being able to ssh in. i tried everytime to pop to shell and see what exactly it was that was eating the resources (and also initiate a proper reboot) but no joy. it hasn't happened for a while now - we can only hope. in the meantime i'm still looking for people who've had the same thing and have found out something more meaningful about what's happening under the lid. give me a kernel panic anyday.

07-31-2003, 05:28 PM	#15
paulhagstrom Prospect Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 9	Just a "me too" message -- I've had several of these "total UI freezes" over the past month or so (10.2.6, Dual 1.25 G4). Usually happens when I've got the machine doing a bunch of things at once (downloading, video compression, CD burning, web browsing, email, ...). I haven't been able to figure out what triggers the freezes, but usually when it happens, I get a immobilized beach ball (that still spins, but it is the only thing that moves on the whole screen). Not every time, but most times, I could still ssh in and everything seemed to be going normally -- all the processes were still processing, downloads were proceeding, video compression was happening, etc. My somewhat uninformed diagnosis of the problem is that the "WindowServer crashed", but I never had any success trying to bring it back to life -- is it possible to "restart" it? I haven't had it happen since I defragged my drives and emptied them a little bit (I was running them pretty full, although usually with at least 1-2GB left free), I don't know if that's relevant. I was getting some occasional messages like "too fragmented to write" for swapfiles (!) which sounded bad enough to me to take the time offline to optimize my drives. I'll be curious to know if anyone solves this.