What is causing streaming media to freeze an old computer?

[landstander]

how are you streaming the media, we all know how bad adobe flash is and how common it is used for this
at one time there was a nvidia+adobe effort to make it have hardware acceleration, but they 1/2 way did it and using it causes it to freeze-up, it should not be enabled by default

Thanks for the heads up on this. I checked and Youtube is set to play video using HTML5, and whats worse is I just noticed that the computer will freeze up even if I'm not doing anything with it and that includes when its not streaming any media. So this might be a larger issue.

[landstander]

also check for any buldging or leaking capacitors.

if the temp is only a few C higher than normal then that is ok and nothing unusual. the problem is when you increase the workload - how much is it then.

removing the heatsink and reapplying the paste is the chepaest way to lower the temp. make sure you clean the old paste form the CPU. i used a cotton bud, you could very lightly soak it with alcohol. make sure nothing drips on the CPU or motherboard though.

capacitors are also in PSU so if you have someone that could borrow you a PSU just to test it it would at least help remove the PSU as a cause.

htop is improved top so might be easier for you to monitor through that. or you can use gkrelm or similar if you prefer a gui.

free -m should give free memory output.

if all freezes sound very much like capacitors issue somewhere... high temp usually causes a reboot or shutdown.

Thank you for the advice on htop. I ran this program and it is a bit more clear on what is goign on then top was. This is a shared workspace computer and someone had installed a daemon that was sucking up all the memory and it would push the CPU usage to unacceptable levels at times and I suspect this may have been what was causing it to freeze up. I have since removed the program, and CPU usage is down by about 10% on each core, and about 500MB of memory has been freed up, so now we are down to about 1.5GB of memory in use while firefox is running and lower when its not.

However I do think the power and overheating issues may also be at play since this computer is very old. Thank you for the tip on checking the caps. I'll be doing that this afternoon when I get a chance.

I haven't been able to get the computer to crash yet after removing the resource most recent resource hog but I've only tried a few of the popular media streaming sources which isn't a very thorough test. I'll make some more tests this afternoon and check the hardware then make another update.

Thank you again for the help, I think we might be making some progress.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

Thanks for the heads up on this. I checked and Youtube is set to play video using HTML5, and whats worse is I just noticed that the computer will freeze up even if I'm not doing anything with it and that includes when its not streaming any media. So this might be a larger issue.

i have had a freeze up issue with newer versions of nvidia's driver (331/340) with my old laptop's Geforce 8200M, no issues on the nouveau driver (maybe this is your issue)
if you cant make it freezeup using noveau try a older versions of nvidia's driver till it stops
* i have no issues with nvidia's more modern GPUs (eg: GTX 650 Ti Boost)


report it to nvidia, mention the ticket i made 140517-000215
they have not been able (or have not bothered) to get the necessary hardware to check on this

[landstander]

i have had a freeze up issue with newer versions of nvidia's driver (331/340) with my old laptop's Geforce 8200M, no issues on the nouveau driver (maybe this is your issue)
if you cant make it freezeup using noveau try a older versions of nvidia's driver till it stops
* i have no issues with nvidia's more modern GPUs (eg: GTX 650 Ti Boost)


report it to nvidia, mention the ticket i made 140517-000215
they have not been able (or have not bothered) to get the necessary hardware to check on this

Thanks for the input. Yeah, I tried this rout too, but the computer was still freezing even after trying every driver for nvidia available in the repo's as well as the proprietary ones from the manufacture (with reboots in between each test of each driver). I've read in other threads that this is sometimes a Driver + Kernel version issue so I've tried some older kernels and that seems to slow down how often a freeze occurs but doesn't never got rid of the problem completely plus some of the software on my setup requires the latest kernels so...

For right now it seems as if the software that was removed that was taking up all the hardware resources seems to have done the trick to stop the freezes from occurring. I haven't been able to freeze up the computer for the past few days after testing with multiple streaming video's open in separate windows or with running multiple graphics applications.

To answer a previous question I've also checked the capacitors on the motherboard and they all seem fine, however it looks like I might need a new power supply as its not keeping a very steady voltage on its outputs.

I've been saving to purchase a new computer but its slow going and with the new smaller architecture chipsets coming out in May I just hope this old computer can last that long.

I'm marking this thread as solved since removing software seems to have done the trick for now.
Thanks for all the help and advice from everyone.

[guiliker]

landstander I have been having the same problem you describe - could you give me a hint at what your software problem was. I don't have nvidia but intel that uses the i915 driver