Lennart Augustsson wrote:

> >Number:         10515
> >Category:       kern
> >Synopsis:       System freeze with ps/top
> 
> >Description:
> 	With fairly heavy system activity the system sometimes freezes totally
> 	when ps or top is invoked.  The system is totally locked up and CTL-ALT-ESC
> 	does not help.
> 	I've now repeated this on two 1.5B systems, one is an IOpener (with a WinChip
> 	CPU and 32M memory) and the other and ordinary Pentium II box (with 128M RAM).
> 	The conditions always seem to be pretty much the same, fairly heavy disk activity
> 	and a loaded CPU together with low memory conditions.  When ps/top is started
> 	the machine freezes at once.

I can't reproduce this on a 1.5A i386 PPro.  I've got multiple programs
that run in a loop touching memory so there's a lot of paging going on,
and a copy of bonnie running at the same time.  I've tried multiple ps's
and top's without any problems...

You're seeing the problem as soon as you type ps/top?  I'd also expect w
to do the same.

Simon.