Get memtest86. I was having some whacky problems on the PC I'm using right this
second, and memtest86 showed that I had some bad memory. I randomly pulled one
of the three memory modules and retested, and it passed the test. It's been
stable as a rock ever since.
http://www.memtest86.com/
It only works on IBM PC compatibles, as it uses the x86 bios. There are some
other options for people with other platforms, such as memtester. I talk about
some of the options in this page in the section "Test the Basic Health of Your
System":
Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/testsuites/
It's not really the case that you need twice the swap space as ram. That's just
a rough rule of thumb. What you need is as much swap space as the maximum total
mapped data memory that you expect to run. Code is paged in directly from the
executable so it doesn't count against swap space. If you run a lot of
applications simultaneously, or you run apps that are memory hungry, then you
need more swap.
They just say "twice the ram" because it's impractical to estimate this. I
would think if you were running out of swap you would get "out of space"
messages when you try to execute programs.
I do suggest also trying bad block checking, at least your swap area. Do "man
mkswap" and look at the -c option. Also if you have an IDE drive, get the
formatting utility from the disk vendor's website and see if it has a read-only
test and check your whole drive. If you have a SCSI disk you may be able to do
this from the SCSI host bus adapter's BIOS setup utility.
Mike
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Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
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