I have been experiencing these same problems since version 2.4.0.
Although, I think it has improved a little in 2.4.4, it still locks
up. The problem seems to be related to memory management and/or swap,
and is seems to do it primarily on machines with over 128Mb of RAM.
Although, I have not tested systematically enough to confirm this.
I have been monitoring the memory usage constantly with the gnome
memory usage meter and noticed that as swap grows it is never freed
back up. I can kill off most of the large applications, such as
netscape, xemacs, etc, and little or no memory and swap will be freed.
Once swap is full after a few days, my machine will lock up.
If I turn swap off all together or turn it off and back on
periodically to clear the swap before it gets full, I do not seem to
experience the lockups.
I am running on an AMD K6-400 with 256 Mb RAM but we have experienced
these problems with various other machines as well.
I hope this information is helpfull in tracking down the problem.
The features of the 2.4.x kernels are great and I believe all the
kernel developers have done a fantastic job! However, I am
disappointed that we are now on the forth 2.4.x kernel version and
such as serious problem that has been there since 2.4.0 still exists.
This is pretty much a show stopper for having a production machine.
In the past when I was running on 2.0.3x kernels, I boasted to
everybody about how rock solid Linux was and I was able to run for 5
months without a single reboot or problem, but for the last year or
more I have not had much better uptime than certain other commercial
operating systems. As important as the new features are, stability
should be top priority for production systems. I apologize if this
sounds a bit like a rant but I feel that ever since the 2.2.x kernel
series, the Linux kernel community has veered away from it's original
philosophy of only releasing stable kernels with even numbered
versions. In fact, I have seen several even numbered kernels released
with far less stability than most of the odd numbered development
kernels.
- Vincent
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