this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
22 points (84.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40403 readers
816 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
22
How to auto-reboot if CPU load too high? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by PlutoniumAcid to c/selfhosted
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I run an old desktop mainboard as my homelab server. It runs Ubuntu smoothly at loads between 0.2 and 3 (whatever unit that is).

Problem:
Occasionally, the CPU load skyrockets above 400 (yes really), making the machine totally unresponsive. The only solution is the reset button.

Solution:

  • I haven't found what the cause might be, but I think that a reboot every few days would prevent it from ever happening. That could be done easily with a crontab line.
  • alternatively, I would like to have some dead-simple script running in the background that simply looks at the CPU load and executes a reboot when the load climbs over a given threshold.

--> How could such a cpu-load-triggered reboot be implemented?

edit: I asked ChatGPT to help me create a script that is started by crontab every X minutes. The script has a kill-threshold that does a kill-9 on the top process, and a higher reboot-threshold that ... reboots the machine. before doing either, or none of these, it will write a log line. I hope this will keep my system running, and I will review the log file to see how it fares. Or, it might inexplicable break my system. Fun!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] GlitzyArmrest 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Crontab to just auto reboot daily is probably better - if your PC becomes unresponsive I doubt it would be able to execute another script on top of everything. Ideally though, you'd do some log diving and figure out the cause.

[–] PlutoniumAcid 3 points 8 months ago

This issue doesn't happen very often, maybe every few weeks. That's why I think a nightly reboot is overkill, and weekly might be missing the mark? But you are right in any case: regardless of what the cron says, the machine might never get around to executing it.