# Intermittent System Crashes



## BawdyAnarchist (Mar 13, 2021)

I'm not 100% sure exactly when it started, but I believe it was upgrading to 12.2 from 12.1.  And then moving from p1 to p4 has made this even more frequent.

I ignored it the first time or so, but now it's happening too regularly to ignore. I understand from chapter 10 of the handbook that I need to enable crash dumps, by configuring a device, then extracting before that device is mounted, and reading with some other program.  Okay, I guess I'll do all that ... and wait for the next crash

But in the meantime I'm trying to see if there's a short text file or something which provides a basic crash code, description, errors.  And I'm also trying to understand if not, then why not? I am obviously showing my ignorance here regarding kernel panics and how they're handled, so thank you for any info.


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## ct85711 (Mar 13, 2021)

Well, some things you could also check out, in between the System crashes would be the system temperatures and your memory.  If your system is overheating, that can easily cause intermittent crashes (more prone to happen when the system is really busy).  Testing your memory would see if one of your memory sticks died on you, thus can cause the system to lock up or crash at random (both while idle and when busy).  Do note, when testing memory, do let the program go through multiple passes through


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## Deleted member 30996 (Mar 13, 2021)

ct85711 said:


> Well, some things you could also check out, in between the System crashes would be the system temperatures and your memory.  If your system is overheating, that can easily cause intermittent crashes (more prone to happen when the system is really busy).


sysutils/gkrellm2 will show an accurate CPU temp. Once it reaches 100c the system will issue a warning that it's overheating in an open terminal if you're compiling ports that will be right on what gkrellm shows as the readout. If it doesn't come down soon it will auto-shutdown as a safety measure and you might be missing it.

If your CPU is supported, some of mine in more detail than others.


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## the3ajm (Mar 13, 2021)

What do you see when the system crashes? It usually logs them and has an output when restarting. I've had sudden black screens which possibly be from a bug from the video driver.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Mar 13, 2021)

the3ajm said:


> What do you see when the system crashes? It usually logs them and has an output when restarting. I've had sudden black screens which possibly be from a bug from the video driver.


Mine never actually crash, they shutdown. A video driver wouldn't cause a system crash.


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## BawdyAnarchist (Jul 10, 2021)

Adding a note for posterity. I fixed this issue a few months ago, just saw that I hadn't updated this thread. It was due to my RAM timing being too aggressive in BIOS. System was posting just fine, but when I ran a RAM test, I was getting loads of errors. Setting my timings more conservatively fixed this.

I didn't realize at the time that even though a system might POST, that doesn't mean the RAM timings are acceptable. Lesson learned.


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