From: bobcook@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Bob Cook)
Subject: I need help explaining strange behavior...
Reply-To: bobcook@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Bob Cook)
Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 19:20:20 GMT

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    151  51.0 20.4 25.4M 6.54M ?  R     17hr - console (WindowServer)
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    151  51.0 20.4 25.4M 6.54M ?  R     17hr - console (WindowServer)
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
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.sysadmin