how to debug freezes?

[envoy510]

My system has completely frozen a few times. Usually it's when nothing much is going on and after a recent reboot. I thought it might be flash related, as I was updating flash one of the times, so I uninstalled flash. I haven't seen the problem since, but I haven't rebooted, either.

Once I saw it when my router died. It happened at the same instant, it appears.

So, perhaps it's network related? I'm plugged into a (different) gigE switch, and it's hung once since the switch of switches.

How does one debug these things? Do people generally feel like Flash is to be trusted?

Anyway, my boot drive is on RAID 1 w/SSDs (Samsung 840 pros). I have 32GB of corsair ram, which I memory tested for 3 days (15+ passes). I'm pretty sure it's OK.

Any ideas?

 

[envoy510]

Just noticed the Multibeast 6.2... perhaps I'll try that. Anyone think that might help? I am on 10.9.2.

 

[ultratony]

Some freezes are related to 4 dimms with XMP enabled. Disable XMP, lower RAM clock to 1333, and see if this solves it.

 

[fidesachates]

Could try increasing the RAM's voltage by .1

I too would like someone to describe the general process of how to debug freezes. I'll describe what I do in case it helps:

1. Open console after the crash and find the boot time line. Start reading the line before this one and keep going up until you find something that looks suspicious. Good rule of thumb are error or warning lines.

2. I've ssh'ed into the system from another machine and tailed /var/log/system.log then I crash it on purpose (if the crashing is not random and has a defined trigger). The last few lines should be related to the crash.


3. Isolate patterns of when and how the crash occurs and google with those symptoms.

Would love for someone to describe if there are additional tricks we can learn from.