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From: Mel <fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 22:05:06 -0900
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Message-Id: <200901052205.06298.fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net>
Cc: Sydney Longfellow <sydney@panhistoria.com>
Subject: Re: Processes Piling up with the lockf state
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On Monday 05 January 2009 06:29:33 Sydney Longfellow wrote:

> I'm getting problems with my server locking up after accumulating far
> too many processes until I have to reboot.
>
> The states of the processes are reading either sbwait or lockf when this
> spiral out of control starts to happen.
>
> Any ideas what might cause this?

sbwait indicates a process is waiting for data on a socket. lockf indicates 
that a process is trying to lock portions of a file. If you put the two 
together, a cause could be network congestion (disk to network) or harddrive 
problems (network to disk).
A server running out of memory and into swap can also be a cause, as processes 
are blocked (sockets don't get data and locks are not acquired) until the 
swap operation is completed. When processes keep getting spawned, this effect 
snowballs.

-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.