[PLUG] I think my new RAM died

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Feb 20 22:48:37 UTC 2009


On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:36:29 -0800 (PST)
Joe Pruett <joey at clean.q7.com> dijo:

> when you run top, hit M to sort by memory usage.  that will show what 
> processes are using the most amount of memory and you can then debug from 
> there.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Unfortunately, hitting M did not disclose anything consuming huge
amounts of RAM. However, I did notice that there was a program called
pdftopdf that was consuming huge CPU cycles. That brought up the
question as to why this program should be running at all. As far as I
know it is a translation thing that CUPS uses when printing to
non-PostScript printers. All my printers are genuine Adobe PostScript.
Also, I had just rebooted and there should be nothing being printed.

And finally a bit more sleuthing and I discovered that the print job
that I had canceled previously was still trying to run, even after
rebooting. I couldn't find the print job to re-kill it because it did
not appear in Manage Print Jobs. So I decided to kill pdftopdf. Shortly
thereafter Manage Print Jobs popped up a notice that there was a
problem printing the print job. And then the rogue print job finally
appeared in the Manage Print Jobs window. Once I killed it everything
went back to normal. 

The free command now says:

jjj at Devil7:~$ free -m
		total	used	free
shared	buffers	cached Mem:	3895	1168
2727	0		39		677 -/+
buffers/cache	451		3444 Swap	3812
6		3806

I still don't understand exactly what the numbers mean, but it looks
like it is using much less.

Having said all that, while the computer is now responding properly, 1)
I don't know what will happen when I reboot - will I still have
problems with X?, and 2) I still can't print the PDF file. I wonder if
the latter problem is another stuck print job. Does anyone know of an
command line tools to find out what CUPS is up to? 'Cause, clearly the
GUI lies.



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