Why is my system unstable?

Systems may become unstable for one of two reasons: hardware or software.

Diagnosing the cause of an unstable system usually requires expert support knowledge and an understanding of both the software running on the machine and the underlying operating system and the hardware on which it is running.

There are some pieces of information that you can gather to help identify the problem, or provide information to whoever is helping you troubleshoot:

• How long has the system been unstable? Was there a period of time when you were using the system and it was stable?
• Did you recently begin running any new processes or additional compilations or test suites on this machine? One of those might be causing the instability, or triggering a latent problem that was already present.
• If this machine is a Virtual Guest, are there any other users having similar problems on their Virtual Guests? This might indicate a hardware or operating system instability problem with the Virtual Host.