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From: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
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Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 09:54:30 -0700
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD 5.3 freezes under heavy hdd load
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On Monday 07 March 2005 09:38 am, cyb wrote:
>  from time to time my FreeBSD freezes under heavy hdd load and only a
> hard reset will bring it back to life with fsck complaining about
> 'Softupdate Inconsistencies'.

I had similar issues on an Athlon machine under 5.3.  In my case it turned 
out that the CPU was running extremely hot.  It would frequently freeze 
while portupgrade was backing up old versions of a port.  I initially 
suspected a disk problem as well, but I haven't yet had any problems since 
cleaning my CPU and chipset fans.  On reflection, my freezes were probably 
due to the CPU running hotter than usual when running bzip2 (which I 
believe is how portupgrade stores its backups, and is very CPU-intensive).

It is possible that your drive is the culprit, but you would probably get 
console messages about I/O failures rather than just a hard freeze.

Flaky memory or power supply are also possibilities.

JN