Yesterday morning was definitely an interesting morning. But before I’m able to explain it, I have to give you some background information on my Linux machine at home, which is my development machine.

Last fall I started hearing CPU fan noise from the machine. Fan noise generally indicates that a bearing is wearing out, something of that nature. It concerned me, so I popped the side of the case off and looked at it. The fan was still running, so that was good, and if I pressed on certain parts of it I could generate the noise. Thus, to eliminate the noise and head off any potential overheating issues, I decided to get a replacement fan.

Only I never really did. I knew I needed one, so I just popped one on my Amazon wish list, which ended up being used as my Christmas list for all of my friends and family. And someone got the CPU fan off of it for me. Haha.

I never ended up putting the fan on, because at some point the noise stopped. And since the machine never overheated and shut off, I figured the issue had worked itself out somehow. It’s rare, but it can happen, so I never investigated further.

There’s background on the CPU fan. Now for the background on how the machine was operating…

My standard development machine is my Linux box, so I have all sorts of tools on it that I use. It’s actually very similar to my setup at work. I run three different Java applications (IDE, SQL client and SVN client) as well as Firefox for web browsing and a bunch of Bash terminals. And this all runs on KDE4.

I feel like KDE4 is a bit more of a memory and resource hog than KDE3, but that’s ok. So when I upgraded to KDE4, I attributed my decreased performance to the upgrade. But there would be times when my machine would get really sluggish and sometimes programs would simply get killed at the operating system level. I thought this was due to a memory issue, since Firefox can be a really damn big resource hog too.

I’d been having trouble with recompilations too. Again, I attributed this to memory allocation issues, and I’ve considered increasing the memory on that machine (I probably will be now, I just have to find out what’s already in there so I order the same stick). So some of my recompilations have caused KDE4 to come down entirely, so I’d started doing recompiles in a TTY without KDE4 running.

So a week ago I started a recompilation of Firefox to its newest version because I thought there may be a chance it would have better memory usage. I left the machine alone to recompile while I did other things. I did this from within a terminal in KDE4 because I turned off most of the other applications running.

So now onto yesterday morning… Working remotely from home.

The machine was at the KDE4 login screen. So I knew the compilation brought down KDE4. I didn’t think much of it, because if the compilation fails then the existing application you’re recompiling will still work. So I logged into the box and started all of my applications up. Yet Firefox… bombed. It would begin startup then just stop and never get anywhere… Hurray.

So I started a recompilation of Firefox from within KDE4 because I was signed on to the company Jabber server. I could still get some things done without Firefox, such as moving batch files from server to server and running other things on our batch process server. And then it happened.

The machine turned off. I was like.. WTF!

At this point, I switched to working from my Windows laptop, where my productivity is greatly reduced. I figured I’d try to recompile Firefox one more time in a TTY while I did work on my laptop. Low and behold… Powered off again.

It was at this point that I knew the CPU fan was toast. I temporarily took some time out to pull the box from my desk, pop off the side and pull the old CPU fan out. Holy crap was the heatsink mega hot, so I knew the fan wasn’t working correctly. Popped the new one in and started it up.

Everything booted up correctly, however I still stopped KDE4 and recompiled Firefox from a TTY. And this time it went much, much faster than it had been in the past. And it went all the way through finish.

So I started up KDE4 and all of my applications, and things seemed to be running faster and more efficiently. Firefox started up just fine, so I moved all of my work back to my Linux machine and worked from it for the rest of the day. No issues from thereon out.

Actually, I didn’t detect any of that common sluggishness that I had been before. So I wonder if my performance issues were related to high heat on the CPU… I don’t necessarily think so, but I guess it’s possible.

So I didn’t end up getting to work 100% from my Linux machine yesterday until 9am, which is 2 hours after I start work. However, I did get plenty of work and standard early-morning monitoring done during that 2-hour period, so I feel like I really only lost about 15-20 minutes or so of working time.

Had the machine powered down during Firefox recompilation after I had replaced the CPU fan, I would have cut my losses and actually headed in to work from the office. Thankfully, my Linux machine’s issues appear to be fixed.

Now all I have to do is send my Windows laptop in to HP to have a fan replaced as well. I can’t replace it myself and it causes overheating and noise issues too. Dammit!