Re: Hard drive crashed!!

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Mar-1997, John Utz <address@hidden> wrote:

| On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, Lynn Chen wrote:
| 
| > I ran 3 octaves in X windows last night. The next day, I found the
| > program half finished with messages saying program error. Then I reboot
| > the system and it won't reboot. Kernel panic. Ran fsck.ext2 to fix
| > the drive, there are unrecoverable errors.
| > 
| > What happened could be that the memory (16m) ran out and it did a lot
| > of disk caching and crashed the disk.
| >
| > ...
| >
| > Just let you know I learned the lesson the hard way. I would not run
| > more that one copy of octave at the same time any more.

|       This would not really be an octave problem per se, this could have
| happened with any other swap intensive operation, i would expect.

It's unfortunate that your hardware failed, but I agree, it is not
likely that Octave is responsible for that.  16MB is not much for
running Linux and X and Octave.  Without more memory than that, I
would certainly not recommend running lots of memory-intensive jobs
simultaneously.  But on systems with much more memory, it should not
be a problem.

jwe