I was copying a large file from a NAS RAID directly to a USB hard drive (using Dolphin drag and drop), and twice got a hard system freeze. The file was large (110GB) so I guess it’s sort of reasonable to expect a problem, but none were reported. It was supposed to take ~5 hours to copy according the the applet - but each time the system froze, not even mouse movement (12.3x64 16GB memory, Phenom II black x6, desktop). The system is very stable otherwise - I do a lot of intense numerical calculations (which were not running during the copy).
The first time there was a report dialog box of kwin crashing, as I recall, and the mouse was able to move. The second time was a complete hard freeze (no mouse movement). I turned power management off as far as I could (no screensaver, etc.) in Configure Desktop and told it to “Act like a PC running on AC power.”
Which logfiles would likely be useful in troubleshooting? I’m going to try to reproduce again, but it happens after a time - about 40 GB into the copy.
tsu2 wrote:
> Some Q that come to mind that could affect data transfer
>
> 1. What protocol is being used for download (eg http, ftp, smb, other)
> 2. What is your network link speed? (eg Fast Ethernet, gigabit, etc)
> 3. What is your network transport (WiFi, wired, etc)
> 4. Verify your available memory before, and maybe even during the file
> transfer with the “free” utility.
> 5. Are there other machines on your network, and how many?
> 6. Which type of network security are you running (eg Workgroup, LDAP,
> AD, etc)
> 7. If possible, have you tried copying to an internal disk instead of
> an external (I assume your USB is external)
Also, I would suggest trying the copy using cp from the command line to
help determine where the problem is. Error messages will be reported
directly in the terminal by the command.
The most likely place to find any other error messages is /var/log/messages
Thank you very much for the reply and suggestions!
It was smb: via dolphin browsing my network (wired) - maybe a couple other odd machines - almost no network traffic. I have a workgroup. Everything’s gigabit except for one flaky/old 100MB switch, but should that freeze opensuse? Should any of those things freeze KDE solid? I should have tried REISUB, maybe, to see if it was just KDE or the entire OS.
It’s a DLink DNS-343 NAS, and it has been bulletproof under smb: and windows workgroups for a long time. Probably cp would have done fine if I had thought of doing that, but a complete machine freeze sort of freaked me out. I guess I would have had to mount the RAID first, and I didn’t remember how to do that. I tried copying on other machines (win XP and Win2k3server) using windows explorer and it copied fine, but those didn’t have the flaky old 100MB switch.
A slow switch can drag down network speed. In essence the network will go to slowest device speed.
But that would not cause a crash just slow copy. it is possible that KDE might cache the file thus it could be a space issue. Also in the past KDE had problems with very large files and lots of little files. Maybe not all is fixed.