Re: aptitude not working

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Richard,

Richard Braun wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 04:59:09PM +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> > it still had plenty of free RAM, the system wasn't doing anything else.
> Let's assume that's the case, although it may still happen that, between
> two top samples, the system could allocate a huge amount of memory and
> hang. And it's not that unlikely.
>
> Check how much of free RAM you have compared to the high thresholds of
> free memory reported at boot.

do you mean what vm_page reports at the earliest stages of boot?
It says 751M in pages, 733M free

perhaps instead of top, should I check vmstat?
after boot and lokin, vm_stat reports 748M in size, 650M free

After loading aptitude, it tells me there are 535M free.  Just before 
hang, I see 526M free and it remains there with "total progress" not 
even starting and nothing to do
(since the system was freshly upgraded with apt-get, I just removed a 
package, thus there was nothing to download)

Should I check memory differently? at a glance, I don't think we are 
going out of mem here.
> The local console (hurd-console, not the mach console) was very recently
> fixed [1] with regard to paging.

either it is not landed yet into debian, or I did have it already: I 
just upgraded with apt-get and saw no updates to console.

Riccardo