This has happened to me a few times, enough so I'd like to understand what's
going on.
I have a Turbo Station running 3.0, 32 Meg, 240 MB disk, and a NeXT mono printer (which was turned off during this entire episode). These eleven libraries are NFS mounted from another NeXT:
/NextAdmin
/NextApps
/NextDeveloper
/NextLibrary
/LocalLibrary
/bin
/lib
/usr/bin
/usr/lib
/usr/pub
/usr/ucb
All of a sudden the machine started giving very slow response, slow enough that the display couldn
't keep up with fairly slow typing. Many "ps" commands over 30-45 minutes showed that WindowServer and Workspace were using almost all the CPU time. Here are the first three lines from a typical response to "ps axgu":
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSIZE RSIZE TT STAT TIME COMMAND
bobcook 157 38.9 9.3 5.58M 2.98M ? S 7:36 /usr/lib/NextStep/Workspace
root 13837 8.2 2.1 1.92M 672K p2 R 0:00 ps axgu
(More typical numbers for these are 3.0% for WindowServer and 0.0% for Workspace.) Apps running at the time: Date, Edit, Mail, Preferences, PrintManager, PrinterTester, and Stuart.
Other information that also might be meaningless: The swapfile was at its minimum (20 MB). No messages were being put in the console at the time. One other peculiar thing was that just sitting and watching a File Viewer on the screen, with the cursor positioned on top of it, I noticed that the cursor "twitched" or blinked fairly often, like every 1-3 seconds, but not at a constant rate. I couldn't tell what was really happening; maybe it was being rewritten to the screen(?).
One final piece of information: The behavior finally stopped, either of its own accord, or because I started NewsGrazer (that's the only action I took before it stopped).
Can anyone give a Unix novice a clue of what might have been happening? Or, of something else to look at if/when it happens again?
Thanks.
--
Bob Cook bobcook@slac.stanford.edu
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center N
eXT mail okay
h fairly slow typing. Many "ps" commands over 30-45 minutes showed that WindowServer and Workspace were using almost all the CPU time. Here are the first three lines from a typical response to "ps axgu":
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSIZE RSIZE TT STAT TIME COMMAND
bobcook 157 38.9 9.3 5.58M 2.98M ? S 7:36 /usr/lib/NextStep/Workspace
root 13837 8.2 2.1 1.92M 672K p2 R 0:00 ps axgu
(More typical numbers for these are 3.0% for WindowServer and 0.0% for Workspace.) Apps running at the time: Date, Edit, Mail, Preferences, PrintManager, PrinterTester, and Stuart.
Other information that also might be meaningless: The swapfile was at its minimum (20 MB). No messages were being put in the console at the time. One other peculiar thing was that just sitting and watching a File Viewer on the screen, with the cursor positioned on top of it, I noticed that the cursor "twitched" or blinked fairly often, like every 1-3 seconds, but not at a constant rate. I couldn't tell what was really happening; maybe it was being rewritten to the screen(?).
One final piece of information: The behavior finally stopped, either of its own accord, or because I started NewsGrazer (that's the only action I took before it stopped).
Can anyone give a Unix novice a clue of what might have been happening? Or, of something else to look at if/when it happens again?
