[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Sunday, 24 May 2015 11:57:50 UTC+1, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)  wrote:
> In article <dd612113-881a-4b95-b44a-93c2b186a173 at googlegroups.com>,
> johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk writes: 
> 
> > It's not clear (to me) that you've understood David's question.
> > 
> > You said "other folks are running fine with the same parameters."
> > But the parameters in question may well be configuration dependent;
> > comparing them with other folks' setups may not shed much light 
> > unless the configurations being compared are identical (which seems
> > unlikely).
> 
> Comparable systems.  I also doubt that a problem with the system 
> parameters, quotas, etc would affect ONLY DECwindows.  Since I have no 
> other problems, I doubt that there is a basic misconfiguration problem, 
> but rather something specific to DECwindows.
> 
> > DECW$TE_%%%% are the DECterm processes iirc, which typically won't
> > exist before a user is logged in, and should be created when the
> > user creates a DECterm.
> 
> OK.
> 
> > re licenses
> > Licensing problems often end up being logged on a console and/or in
> > OPERATOR.LOG somewhere. Do you have logging enabled anywhere, have you
> > checked for any potentially relevant messages in the logfile?
> 
> Yes, and yes.
> 
> > re troubleshooting in general
> > VMS has loads of tools which the well informed sysadmin can use to
> > quickly and logically troubleshoot situations like this. But you have
> > to look, and know (or find out) where to look. If you don't know and
> > are being helped by outsiders, you need to listen carefully and
> > respond accordingly, otherwise progress may well be slow.
> 
> The process DECW$SERVER_0 looks suspicious.  On other systems, where
> things work, it basically just sits there.  Here, it is looping (but not
> such that it consumes a lot of CPU).  After a few minutes, it stops
> looping.  One can see in accounting that processes get the
> SYSTEM-F-IMGDMP which I mentioned before, but I can't find any 
> information on this related to DECwindows.
> 
> I didn't see anything suspicious in SHOW PROC/ACC or SHOW PROC/QUOT, but 
> then I might not be looking for the right things.
> 
> I guess what I need to figure out is to see what this process is doing, 
> what causes it to loop, etc.
> 
> Again, I do see the hourglass on the back background, so it is not a 
> problem with the very basic setup.  The problem is definitely related to 
> the looping processes.  Unfortunately, I don't see any error messages in 
> any log files.

On what basis do you expect that a resource problem won't "affect
only DECwindows"? Depending on your system configuration (hardware AND software) and parameters (neither of which readers here can see directly),
it is entirely possible that DECwindows is one of the most demanding
appplications on your system in terms of numbers of processes and other
related stuff, and therefore entirely possible that only DECwindows has
a visible issue.

Or DECwindows may be a trivial application in comparison with what else
is configured on your system. We can't see from here.

Lots of assumptions going on here, and not so much communication of
first hand facts (even if they don't mean much to you, someone here
might spot something). Sometimes diagnosis can be quicker if based on
evidence rather than assumptions. Sometimes informed intuition is
quicker.

I'm out and about for the next few hours (it's a wet Whit weekend
here in the UK). Once again, best of luck.