How to avoid turning power off when Puppy freezes?

[LNSmith]

G'day all:

I find that Stretch Puppy 7.5 freezes or crashes. More detail below. When Puppy freezes completely - apart from turning the power off - what action can I take to recover?

Leslie

More info.
Installed Stretch Puppy onto a USB flash drive.
Began looking for a package to test a flash drive.
(I suspect I have a bad drive (or three)).
Arrived at a web-page and began to download. (Name not available now).
Pale Moon (I think PM is the guilty "pet" locked up.
Mouse point would move (sort of). Many seconds between moving the mouse and seeing the pointer move ....
Nothing could induce the Puppy to return control to the mouse or kbd.

Help!!

[nic007]

I have never been able to recover from a system freeze during a session. Have to switch the machine off and start again. Probably not what you wanted to hear but that's it. Luckily, I only run in RAM with no savefile so basically no chance of system corruption.

[MochiMoppel]

Pale Moon (I think PM is the guilty "pet" locked up.
Mouse point would move (sort of). Many seconds between moving the mouse and seeing the pointer move ....
Nothing could induce the Puppy to return control to the mouse or kbd.

Sounds familiar. I experienced this often on a netbook with only 1GB RAM. But this is not a total freeze, let alone a crash. The computer takes a long time to process every mouse or keyboard action. My solution: A killer action like Alt+F4 (to close PM) or even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (to kill X). Then wait for these keystokes to be processed. Time to go for lunch or dinner. Usually the machine is back to normal when I return.
I tried to avoid these quasi freezes by deleting PM's cache directory (/root/.cache/moonchild productions) immediately after starting PM. Seemed to work. Maybe a swap file would have helped too.
After changing to a 2GB netbook everything is fine.

[bigpup]

Make sure you have updated Pale Moon to the latest version.
A lot of bug fixing has recently been done.
If you now have a Pale Moon 28 version.
Help>About Pale Moon>Check for Updates

[LNSmith]

Hello Mochi:
Your description is quite accurate. Yes, I have some control over the mouse/mouse pointer. The pointer follows the mouse, but with many seconds between the two movements. This info is/will be useful because I want to take The Puppy for a walk on an slower and smaller machine (DELL laptop) than I using now. (Even this machine is somewhat dated.)

Without starting a diatribe, it's obvious that I have far more computing power than I need, provided I can use what I have (without the need for performance-degrading virus/intruder software running "under" everything else). More than that, OUR society is slowly consuming all our resources (and especially energy). I could do 90% of my work on a computer that consumes 25% of the power this desktop uses - but I need reliability. Older is sufficient, provided it lasts for many years.

So - I look to The Puppy running on older hardware as a long-term solution. Our society must live on a smaller budget. Your posting is a small part of the solution I need!

Leslie

[mikeslr]

Hi LNSmith,

Part of the reason Puppies function so quickly is that they operate almost completely in RAM [I won't go into details here regarding the exceptions] while almost all other operating systems constantly read-and-write to storage. The downside of Puppy's way of functioning occurs when you have limited RAM and are using an application such as a Web-browser. Puppy doesn't create its own Web-browsers. It uses those published by other organizations modifying the originals only when necessary. One of the things web-browsers do is to store data on your computer. They don't do this primarily for your benefit. Primarily its done for the benefit of websites. The first time you view a web-page the website has to transmit all the data necessary for you to do so to your computer. As long as that data is on your computer the Website doesn't have to transmit it to your computer again. In other operating systems this data would have been written to Storage. In Puppy, by default, it remains in RAM, reducing the RAM available to do anything. The data websites transmit and store on your computer has the name "cache".

There are three solutions to this problem. (1) Reduce the allowed amount of such data which can be stored: Older data will be deleted to make room for 'incoming" data; (2) clear the cache frequently: in Palemoon you can Click the"History" Tab, then "Clear Recent History" and select what to clear; (3) Move the cache folder out of RAM.

Open rox (your file manager) to /root: It probably will open there automatically. Click Rox's EYE so you can see "hidden files". You'll see a folder named ".moonchild productions". Note the dot at the beginning of the name; that's what makes it a hidden file. This is where Palemoon stores your profile: settings, bookmarks, addons. [If you have firefox or seamonkey you'd also see a folder named .mozilla used by them to store their profiles]. But you'll also see a folder named ".cache". Left-Click it. Within you'll see a folder again with the name ".moonchild productions". That's where Palemoon stores its cache. Leave the .cache folder open and click the desktop-drive icon with the grey-square (some-system an 'x') in its top-right corner. This should be THE short-cut to where your Puppy files are located. At any rate, you want to Left-Click the desktop-drive icon to the drive/partition where those files are. Now RIGHT-Click an empty space and select New>Directory and give it a suggestive name. [I have several Puppies on my computer, each in its own folder and re-direct the cache accumulated by a Puppy to those folder rather than one folder]. The name I use is "Browser-Stuff".

Left-Press, Hold then drag the moon-child productions folder from /root/.cache to e.g. Browser-Stuff and select MOVE. Then drag it back to /root/.cache and select Link(relative).

Menu>Exit>Restart-x. Puppy will re-catalog what is on its system so that the change will take place immediately. Also remember to SAVE this changed configuration to your SaveFile/Folder.

The result is that Palemoon will now write cache directly to your drive rather than hold it in RAM. FYI, only storage space --represented by desktop-drive icons-- and the folders and files within your drives/partitions are outside of RAM.

[tallboy]

[mikeslr]

With a partial freeze you may be able to do this:

Menu>System>Task Manager. It will show you how much of your computer's resources are being used by applications. Right-Click the application using the most and select Stop (or if necessary Kill).

[HerrBert]

There are three solutions to this problem. (1) Reduce the allowed amount of such data which can be stored: Older data will be deleted to make room for 'incoming" data; (2) clear the cache frequently: in Palemoon you can Click the"History" Tab, then "Clear Recent History" and select what to clear; (3) Move the cache folder out of RAM.

1 + 2:see below

3: helped me on (very*) limited hardware

+ created a swapfile on harddrive - better would be a swap-partition, but it's a 4G flash-drive, so no benefit in reformating...
+ made a script in /root/Startup

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10

With a partial freeze you may be able to do this:

Menu>System>Task Manager. It will show you how much of your computer's resources are being used by applications. Right-Click the application using the most and select Stop (or if necessary Kill).

If it is the kind of partial freeze, i encountered here, you are not able to do anything like that...

*)nowadays, 1Gb Ram and Atoms with 1,6GHz seem to be very limited

[Mike Walsh]

*)nowadays, 1Gb Ram and Atoms with 1,6GHz seem to be very limited....

Yup. A P4, even with 1.5-2 GB RAM, is even more limited!

My old Compaq desktop runs a dual-core Athlon64 X2 and 3 GB of DDR1 RAM. It's a very early, first-gen dual-core (came out when the Pentium 4's were still holding sway, so you know how old it is). This combo just nicely 'cuts it' as far as Puppy's concerned; snappy enough to still be useful, and worth using. Runs modern Chrome nicely, and will encode videos without a lot of fuss.

But I'd never want to return to a single-core, despite having had the original single-core Athlon64 from this system tucked away in the back of a drawer for the last 4 years. It's strictly there for emergencies only..!

-------------------------------------

@ tallboy:-

Thanks for the link to the Wikipedia 'R-E-I-S-U-B' article, Olaf. I'd heard about this years ago, but never really understood it until now. I get the occasional jam-up myself, and have to do a hard 'power-off' (which I detest doing). I'm convinced it doesn't do the system one bit of good at all.......

I'll try this next time, and see how I get on with it. 'PrintScreen' (no 'SysRq' here, I'm afraid!), plus each key in order; sounds straight-forward enough.

We'll see.


Mike.

[tallboy]

Mike, I think a key with SysRq printed on it, disappeared sometime in the early '90s...
The way the commands are executed, is vital, so read the manual, and PRINT IT ON PAPER! It is not very helpful if you have it in a text file on the computer... (and don't ask me how stupid one can be!)

HerrBert: I don't use bookmarks or history in my PaleMoon (good brain preservation practice!), and I close my browser between topics; i.e. when I am finished with this Puppy session, I close the browser, and all cookies are deleted. My Preferences window look like this:

[B.K. Johnson]

@tallboy
Thanks very much for those links. I have often got the freeze and sometimes getting out of it with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. But I use Composer a lot, often have several unsaved pages when I get the freeze and loose the unsaved documents. From the articles provided, it seems I'd be able to recover them. As a result, I am very anxious to use SysRq. It appears that the kernel 3.14.79 used in tahr-6.0.6 was not compiled with that flag set. I get no response with Alt+SysRq+space or Alt+SysRq+h.

I appeal to our members who are compiling kernels to ensure that SysRq is set when doing so in the future and perhaps a pet to add to existing kernels.

Has anyone found a kernel in a puppy that has SysRq installed?.

[tallboy]

It's not in my Lucid 5.2.8.7 either, but I think I had it a dpup484/485/486 version. My old PCs have little mRAM, so there have been a number of total freezes when I have overloaded the system. I think that the more recent mishaps is limited to problems with X. I any case , the usual solution have been the power button, but in a couple of instances, I have had to pull the power plug. BTW, try searching for sysrq in the system files, with pFind. If it exists, it has to be activated with a 1.

[B.K. Johnson]

@tallboy
You wrote:

I think that the more recent mishaps is limited to problems with X.

I think you're right!

I any case , the usual solution have been the power button,

+1

but in a couple of instances, I have had to pull the power plug.

+1

BTW, try searching for sysrq in the system files, with pFind. If it exists, it has to be activated with a 1.

sysrq not found in tahr-6.0.6.

[Semme]

C (More) BUT(T)! :D

[mini-jaguar]

Pretty much any browser will freeze if you have too much stuff and too many pages on at the same time.

One solution is to use control/alt/backspace to get into text mode, then type xwin and return to get back to the desktop. You might have to wait after you press ctl/alt/bcksp because sometimes there is a delay when the memory is particularly full. I can't guarantee this will always work either.

When you're back into the window manager, turn off the internet, then turn on the browser and delete the cache and/or cookies. Then restart the internet. Do not click on all the tabs until you have closed some, you have too much stuff and it will lock again with too many pages.

[tallboy]

If there exists any way to shut down only X when you have a freeze, it would be a great help. Then you didn't have to powerofff, you could run from a terminal window, and find the reason for the freeze. The problem is that a frozen X also freezes the keyboard and mouse...

[linuxcbon]

When the RAM is full and the PC is then very very slow : you can try pressing at same time :
CTRL + ALT + F2 to go to another virtual desktop.
CTRL + ATL + F4 to go back to the main X window.

But if the mouse and keyboard are really frozen, the only solution is to ssh from another PC, but that's technical.

[pp4mnklinux]

Hi:

I wrote a lot of posts trying to solve this problem, that for me appears when I have a lot of tabs open with SLIMJET 21.

I include a RAM indicator and when it achieves 75% my PC starts to work slowly, slowly... till at 78% or usaged ram, it blocks completely.

The only solution I found was trying to mantein the needed resources under this level, trying to run the less possible programs when starting to download a big file.

HAVE A NICE DAY

G'day all:

I find that Stretch Puppy 7.5 freezes or crashes. More detail below. When Puppy freezes completely - apart from turning the power off - what action can I take to recover?

Leslie

More info.
Installed Stretch Puppy onto a USB flash drive.
Began looking for a package to test a flash drive.
(I suspect I have a bad drive (or three)).
Arrived at a web-page and began to download. (Name not available now).
Pale Moon (I think PM is the guilty "pet" locked up.
Mouse point would move (sort of). Many seconds between moving the mouse and seeing the pointer move ....
Nothing could induce the Puppy to return control to the mouse or kbd.

Help!!

[tallboy]

You can try pressing at same time : CTRL + ALT + F2 to go to another virtual desktop.

Uh-uh, not after your keyboard and mouse is frozen, and give no response at all.