Comment 29 for bug 183685

I wanna share my observations relative to spontaneous compiz crashes.

1. This crash occurs only under conditions of hi load average and insufficient free RAM:

top - 18:45:56 up 1 day, 1:46, 4 users, load average: 6.41, 6.37, 4.32
Tasks: 140 total, 5 running, 135 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 19.4%us, 4.0%sy, 0.8%ni, 68.0%id, 7.1%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 515608k total, 506132k used, 9476k free, 7632k buffers
Swap: 2345436k total, 542644k used, 1802792k free, 119528k cached

2. Usually such conditions reached when many applications loaded, and I try to switch between them or start new big application (such as firefox or evolution)

3. Also I've mentioned that probability of a crash increases during installation of new packages (i.e. .deb packets being unpacked and installed). I suppose that working dpkg/aptitude consume much CPU/RAM in parallel with heavy input-output, which leads to abnormally hi load average

4. Before every crash the system becomes completely unresponsive for a few seconds. It also may occur because of hi load, but maybe compiz freezes just before crash?

Sorry for so many letters