My Wasta Linux machine has been freezing at seemingly random moments. (Not slowing down; only freezing to the point where it won't respond to any interrupts except a hard restart.)
I'm running Memtest86+ to help me diagnose the issue, and I expected it to take a while, but it's already been 13 hours with no end in sight. There's other work that I need to get done.
Is it okay to interrupt Memtest86+ while it's running without adversely affecting the machine?
If you're talking about memtest86/memtest86+, as in the bootable programs, sure. Interrupting it won't do anything, since it never writes any persistent data. In fact, the tests are intentionally endless - it'll just keep running passes until you stop it.
memtest is structured as a number of tests, each of a specific pattern. A single completed run through all selected tests is known as a pass. As mentioned before, you can safely abort at any time, simply by switching off the machine.
There is no optimal number of passes - an obvious failure will be caught in the first pass, while intermittent failures might take a hundred passes to appear (at which point you might as well get ECC RAM). I used to recommend running at least 10 passes to catch the more common intermittent failures, though with larger RAM capacities these days it could take too long.
