Hello again all,

Following the success of my last need to post here I changed my Odroid N2+ Plex server over to Armbian (making two Armbian-running Odroids in the house).

The N2+ is running Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) with Linux 5.9.6-meson64

I have had a few occasions where I have encountered a system-wide freeze. Today's lasted over an hour, whilst others have unfrozen after ~20-30 minutes.

Today the machine was ping-able but attempts to ssh in were unsuccessful though there was no timeout and no error messages when trying. Prior to that I was listening to some music in which the playback was faltering, leaving silence for several seconds duration before resuming with the audio.

I'd like some assistance in learning what to look for and where.

I have run cat /var/log/syslog and the log is dominated by repeated entries as shown below. Entries that don't match the below are mostly cron jobs for pinhole checking for updates etc and are running successfully.

 

Jan 15 16:39:04 localhost systemd[1]: Started Serial Getty on ttyS0.
Jan 15 16:39:14 localhost systemd[1]: serial-getty@ttyS0.service: Succeeded.
Jan 15 16:39:14 localhost systemd[1]: serial-getty@ttyS0.service: Service RestartSec=100ms expired, scheduling restart.
Jan 15 16:39:14 localhost systemd[1]: serial-getty@ttyS0.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 101879.
Jan 15 16:39:14 localhost systemd[1]: Stopped Serial Getty on ttyS0.

II see another user has mentioned this issue in this thread without resolution.

At the point below the freeze has started, as I can see when I unplugged the network cable and plugged it in again.
 

Jan 15 13:25:52 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail() returned a value that is exceptionally large: 203768 bytes (530 ms).
Jan 15 13:25:53 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_usb_audio'. Please report this issue to the A$
Jan 15 13:26:06 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_dump():
Jan 15 13:27:08 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c: Hardware PCM card 1 'E30' device 0 subdevice 0
Jan 15 13:28:27 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c: Its setup is:
Jan 15 13:29:43 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c:   stream       : PLAYBACK
Jan 15 13:32:09 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c:   access       : MMAP_INTERLEAVED
Jan 15 13:34:05 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c:   format       : S32_LE
Jan 15 13:36:31 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c:   subformat    : STD
Jan 15 13:38:47 localhost pulseaudio[3426]: E: [alsa-sink-USB Audio] alsa-util.c:   channels     : 2
Jan 15 13:40:17 localhost kernel: [1042357.158180] meson8b-dwmac ff3f0000.ethernet eth0: Link is Down
Jan 15 13:40:24 localhost kernel: [1042363.948844] meson8b-dwmac ff3f0000.ethernet eth0: Link is Up - 1Gbps/Full - flow control rx/tx

Prior to that is just hundreds of the message groups as per the top example, with the exception of this.

Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: bits received from HRNG source: 8720064
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: bits sent to kernel pool: 8668192
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: entropy added to kernel pool: 8668192
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2 successes: 436
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: HRNG source speed: (min=205.091; avg=474.633; max=1059.638)Mibits/s
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: FIPS tests speed: (min=3.701; avg=20.017; max=59.419)Mibits/s
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: Lowest ready-buffers level: 2
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: Entropy starvations: 0
Jan 15 13:07:07 localhost rngd[2716]: stats: Time spent starving for entropy: (min=0; avg=0.000; max=0)us

Then there's bunch of kernel stuff but I'm not sure of the best way to copy it all out. Lots of references to memory and swap.

 

Jon

Providing logs with 

armbianmonitor -u

 helps with troubleshooting and significantly raises chances that issue gets addressed.

Here https://pastebin.com/TFZLdScm

Seems incomplete. Did armbianmonitor -u not work for you or why did you choose to use -U instead?

armbianmonitor -u said "Network/firewall problem detected. Not able to upload debug info.
Please fix this or use "-U" instead and upload whole output manually"

Quote

[1050324.265402] Out of memory: Killed process 2871 (Plex Media Serv) total-vm:3511208kB, anon-rss:208056kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:998 pgtables:2348kB oom_score_adj:0

Whatever you are doing eat all of the memory ... 

Interesting. Didn't catch that. Funny though that I run Jellyfin (something like Plex but open source) on a x86 machine with only 2G of memory

8 hours ago, Igor said:

Whatever you are doing eat all of the memory ... 

Well, I had Plex running. I had two other tabs open: Tautulli and americascup.com (the racing has started) but it wasn’t playing any video. Or doing anything else. 

Syncthing also running in the background. That’s it. 

I have Jellyfin installed but yet to configure it for remote access so not currently using it. 

Can I do anything to rectify the memory usage issue (assuming Plex is the culprit) ?