Hi, Those of you who were on ice4 found that the server was behaving very strangely on Thursday, which isn't a reason to stop using the servers (they're still more reliable than your desktop), BUT you should do the following in the future: If you find that your XEmacs hangs and freezes, OR R kills itself, OR your VNC session gets terminated for no apparent reason, you can log in to the server you're working on and type: ice1:olau~> top This tells you who's running the process that's killing yours. There are a couple columns that look like this: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 28136 finkler 35 10 344m 62m 63m R 95.8 1.6 24:45.59 matlab 29442 olau 26 10 2792 1340 2460 R 3.7 0.0 0:00.06 top There are three columns you should pay attention to: * NI, which tells you if the process is niced (so it won't hog the CPU) THIS MATTERS. * %CPU, which tells yo how much of *one* CPU the process is using -- these numbers won't add up to 100% because there are two CPUs for each ice1-4 machine. THIS DOESN'T MATTER, AS LONG AS THE PROCESS HAS NI >= 10. So it looks like this finkler person is being bad because he's taking up almost 100% of one CPU, but he's actually ok because his process has NI=10. * %MEM -- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT COLUMN. Memory (RAM) is fixed so if there's a process that's taking up a significant amount of memory (like 50% plus) this puts a squeeze on the system and it has to hot-swap memory, which makes everything go nuts and fail. (This is what happened on Thursday.) So in the future, if you find that the servers are behaving strangely, you can use top to figure out why. And if it turns out that it's not your process that's making trouble, you can figure out who is responsible, tell me about it, and I will talk to FAS for you. Yours, Olivia.