panther crashing too much lately

Racer D

Racer D

what?
panther (as well as jaguar before) used to work very stable for me. but for the last month or 2 it has been crashing every now and then. Today I reinstalled it (used the old preferences files and reinstalled some apps) and it just crashed. It always happens when the computer is quite "busy". Everything just freezes. the only thing that works is my mouse. it moves normally. the music plays for some time, then stops, starts playin again for a few seconds, stops again etc. the machine does respond to ping.

the only suspicious thing in my logs that I could find is alot of these:
Mar 21 21:57:03 [218] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Mar 21 21:57:03 [218] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Mar 21 21:57:03 [218] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Click to expand...
in /var/log/windowserver.log

using G4 iMac 700mhz, 512mb ram, gf2mx. 3rd party hw: logitech mx500, 256mb ram stick bought in an apple store, epson stylus color 760, canoscan lide30, wacom graphire 2

I don't recall installing any suspicious software, that would run all the time lately. what runs is konfabulator (been using it for long time though) and quakemenu. maybe some update like 10.3.2 or such?

anyone that had similar problems or has any clue what could be going on?
 
My suggestion is to use the OS CD to boot up. Go to the Installer menu and select Disk Utility. Have it repair all the problems it finds. You may need Drive 10 or Disk Warrior to repair the things that Disk utility can't.

Did you machine come with Hardware Test CD? Boot from that to check over everything. RAM has been known to fail. Apple should replace it if that is the problem.
 
ran the hw test and everything passed. checking video ram gave me some strange screens (black, white, blue, diagonal lines...) but that's probably normal?

ran the "repair disk", and it said that my disk looks fine.

if ram is the problem, hw test would probably say something about it, right?
might my disk be the problem? should I try formatting it?

right now I'm running without my printer, wacom & scanner plugged in, without konfabulator and quake menu running and I'll see if it crashes...
 
You said you reinstalled, so I don't see it being a permissions or disk-related problem. I think you might be having some preferences or utility related problem instead. Also: Always create a test user which doesn't run any of the third party utility stuff (konfabulator, haxies, quake menu and the likes...). In this test user, just try to work with the basics. try TextEdit, try Safari... If you can work for a longer period of time with the test user, the OS installation should be okay. You then have to try and find out which utility/haxie/application is causing the problems with your 'real' user-account. I'd also urge you to remove basically anything that's in login items for a while...
 
I reinstalled, but didn't format...

I just tried opening, running a bunch of stuff (my load averages were around 20), and it didn't crash. I gotta see how it handles to keep the disk busy for some time...

dunno really how to debug with new user, cus sometimes it stays up for 2 weeks or more before it crashes and sometimes (yesterday) a few hours. but it always happened when it had some major work to do...
 
Very important: does your boot-volume have enough space for swap-files?
As in teh post i wrote 5 minutes ago in this forum,
OSX tends to fill up it's disk quite heavily,
especially if there's limited disk space.

i usually leave around 2 Gig free for swap on the boor volume,
and even then sometimes the machine slows down.

Also (anecdote):
One day a collegue said she would send me a file,
over the lan. i said: "ok. put it in my dropbox"
but she didn't tell it was a 900MB file,
so after a few minutes everything started to act strange,
until almost everything froze..
Usually when things freeze, it's good to wait a few minutes,
and usually things start to go again, but in my case, also after
10 minutes nothing happened anymore.
So i force-restarted, and after i found out all my mail was gone.
Porbably due to a corruopt mail-index database or something..
Another thing is safari's cache. this usually also starts to become
a huge big old tree of folders, subfolders and many many files,
after some hours of surfing.
Anyway, OSX' handling of disk- and swapspace could be much better...


arri
 
I always try to keep atleast 5gb free, but my disk was quite filled lately. And when multitasking, maybe OS X does eat up gigs of swap? is this possible?
right now I have 13gb free, and when testing yesterday, maybe this helped it not freeze?

I always wait around 10 to 15 minutes before I give up and force-restart

how do I check, how big my swap is?
 
could it be a heat issue?

if its always happening under heavy load maybe a fan or heatsink has come loose.
 
OS X needs quite a bit of space for vm, which is your swapfile(s).

It starts out allocating 64mb of space automatically, then (on my machine at least), does another 64 mb, then 128 mb, then jumps up to either 512 mb or 1 gig, and does 1 gig chunks from there.

I've seen well over 5 gigs in swapfile(s) before on my computer, and I have 2 gig of ram for my machine.

An easy way to see how many swapfiles you have is by choosing: Go to folder from the finder menu, then typing: /var/vm

One word of warning DO NOT try to manually remove a swapfile, as you could cause your system to crash. There are some utilities out there, don't know any of the names, that will safely remove them for you. But I personally wouldn't mess with that, I'd just reboot which resets the swapfiles back to just one.

Another possibility is that one of your old prefernces is messing with the system. I ran into this problem lately when installing 10.3.x on my brothers machine. I did a clean install on his 2nd drive, then copied all his user folder data (10.2.8) to 10.3.x. After rebooting the finder would hang and act very funny.

Then I took everything back out, and just moved the stuff over that was important, like mail, music, movies, pictures, bookmarks, and restarted and everything was fine.

If you copied some applications over to your new install, did you also copy the files over from (system) Library/Application Support? Many 3rd party applications put files in there that they need in order to run properly.

Another thing is, maybe one of your 3rd party drivers isn't playing nicely. This doesn't relate to you directly, but there I read where Kensington Mouseworks wasn't working well with an Adaptec scsi card, after updating to 10.3.3.

I've also seen reports (I've never used it myself so I have no personal experience), that Konfadulator has/had a memory leak issue, and maybe 10.3.3 made it worse. Again, I have no experience with the program, but I have seen reports on it in other forums.

Do like fryke said and create a new 'test' account, run some of the same programs you run under that new account to see if you can create the problem in that fresh account.

If it runs fine, then it has something to do with your 'normal' user account.

Sorry for being so long winded...just tried to rattle off some of the possiblities that I've ran into myself.

Good luck
 
Have you recently added 3rd party ram? do you have extra ram that you can try swapping with your current ram?
in all, the majority of kernel panics i have seen are due to cheap / bad ram.
 
could it be a heat issue?
if its always happening under heavy load maybe a fan or heatsink has come loose.
Click to expand...
I doubt it, since it would happen yesterday when I overloaded machine and it had load averages above 10 for more than 2 hours


naodx:
I'll see how much space /var/vm is gonna take, currently it's 64mb but I've just rebooted (sw update)

I understand how preference files could affect an app crashing, but do you think they can cause the whole system to freeze? they're taken from the same system as I'm running now (10.3.3). And it's not always the same app that crashes it.
I did copy the /Library/Application Support from my old install

Do like fryke said and create a new 'test' account, run some of the same programs you run under that new account to see if you can create the problem in that fresh account.
Click to expand...
I can't even reproduce the problem with my account. And I have no idea what crashes it... Once it was expose, once package install...

Fahrvergnuugen: It's not a kernel panic, with kernel panic everything halts, I have a feeling only windowserver is the problem here


btw, is there a key combination or something to kill windowserver? can I kill it via ssh? should the system restart windowserver right after killing it?
 
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