[MPlayer-users] How to check why mplayer freezes the system ?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 12:01:56PM +0000, Diego Zuccato wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> 
> > Huh? It sounds strange for me ... mencoder is no more than a file to file
> I know! And it's NOT suid root, too...
> > converter at least from the point of view of OS ;-)) So it should not freeze
> > everything. If it does it's caused eg because your CPU is overclocked, your
> > CPU fan is in the "shit" life cycle or something similar. Of it can freeze
> > your system, any other program can do it as well.
> Well, it freezes just the laptop. The CPU is not overclocked, and as
> long as I can see it doesn't overheat (at 51-52C it works normally, but
> additional fan keeps it under 45, so I think it's not an
> overheat-related problem). The strange thing is that when doing
> disk-intensive ops, sometimes the machine hangs for 2-3 seconds (maybe
> it's hdd- or reiserfs- related... never did it on the old 10GB disk with
> ext2... but I never used mencoder be4 changing disk, just ftp tranfers
> were around 10-11MB/s while now I can't reach continuous 7MB/s).
> So I'm not complaining for mencoder!

Probably messed up/dying hd then. I've had similar problems before,
altho they don't lock up the box, but manage to freeze all hd access
for a while until the drive resets. You might try using hdparm to
disable multiblock reads, or even disable dma (!!) and see if the
lockups go away. Of course replacing the hd before all your data goes
bye-bye is probably a good idea if it does turn out to be the disk's
fault...

Rich