Why does an Exerciser enter a “hung” state?
STM monitors the progress of all running tools and expects each tool to send a “heartbeat” every minute or so. If these heartbeat indications are not received within a two minute window, the tool state is changed to “hung”. The causes for a hung tool can be one of the following: • The most probable cause is that the tool is not getting enough CPU time, which can be caused by the system being extremely busy or by executing several exercisers simultaneously, especially if using the “maximum stress” option. In this case, the tool will eventually make enough progress to send another heartbeat at which time its state will be changed back to “running”. The user may opt to abort the tool and wait for the system to become less busy. If it is desired to run several exercisers at once, it is recommended that the “medium stress” option be used. • The tool has stopped executing. This situation is rare and would typically only be caused by a kernel driver that has stopped responding. In this case,
