Will DDR3 memory freeze 10.04?

[Preston Hagar]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 3:10 PM, scar <scar at drigon.com> wrote:
> Trying desperately to figure out why a brand-new system running 10.04
> 64-bit keeps freezing after 3-5 days uptime.  power supply tests good,
> memtest reports no errors after going through 1 pass, i re-greased the
> cpu, fans running fine, tried running the system w/o graphics card
> completely....
>
> Is it the DDR3 memory?  I understand ubuntu doesn't support that speed
> yet.  Or maybe some other new technology that ubuntu is tripping over?
> it's an ASUS M4A87TD/USB3 motherboard.
>

When you say freezing, what exactly do you mean?  Does it freeze and
never come back?  Have you tried pinging or ssh into the machine from
another machine while it is frozen?

My current machine is a AMD Phenom II X6 1090T with 16 GB of DDR3 1333
RAM and a GeForce 9500 GT video card with 512 MB onboard memory.  I am
running 64-bit Lucid.   Everything, as far as I can tell, seems to run
at "full speed".  I use the binary NVIDIA video drivers from nvidia's
website to run a dual monitor setup.  When I first set it up, I ran
into an occasional bug where, when crossing my mouse from one screen
to the other, it would cause the xorg cpu usage to shoot to 100% and
"freeze" the GUI.  Sometimes I could press ALT-F2 and get a console,
but most of the time I had to ssh in from another machine.  I could
then kill xorg and start it back up and everything would work fine.
It turns out in the combination of nvidia driver and xorg versions I
had, there was a bug where if the right monitor was your primary and
the left monitor was your secondary and you moved the mouse from the
right to the left, it would cause the signed int they were using to
track the x coordinate of the mouse to "loop around" into negatives,
causing x to go crazy.  The solution at the time was to just make the
left monitor the primary and it didn't happen any more.  I think they
may have fixed that bug in more recent updates.

My point though is that even with all of the crazy computing power, a
bug in xorg still managed to more or less freeze my system.  All my
hardware is good and since I made my left monitor the primary and
updated my NVIDIA drivers, I haven't had any lockups.

I would suggest installing/turning on openssh-server and trying to ssh
into the box next time it locks up.  If you can, you can do a top or
htop to try to figure out what is taking 100% of the cpu(s) and
locking it up.  It may be that it isn't truly frozen, but a bug in a
program is taking up so many resources that even keyboard input isn't
getting to the computer.

Hope that helps,

Preston