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Date:      Tue, 16 Jun 1998 23:36:28 +0800
From:      Al Chen <hua@nease.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Is there any "race condition" in FFS? 
Message-ID:  <3.0.32.19980616233605.0068f80c@mail.nease.net>

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Actually, we think our server's error is a very rare condition,
because we have set up many FreeBSD servers ,and there was nothing wrong
actually,and 
also,as we limit the numbers of qmail-smtpd process to 60,the system seems
become stable,
and only when the number of smtp connections is over 100,the problem will
come out.
And actually maybe it's just with qmail (which do many many file operation
in mail queue).
Our server is a compaq Server ,pentium Pro-200 CPU and 256M,and NCR SCSI card
and seagate 4.3G UW HD.
and as the load of the system is very low,so we want to bring up the number
of the smtp connection,
and then the error happen sometimes when there are over 100 smtp connections .
Of course we believe that,this is a disk block realloc error and the error
message is always
"blkfree: freeing free block" which can be found in ffs_alloc.c,and the
function is release a whole block which is totally free (and as there are
no error of "freeing free frag",so we believe that there is nothing wrong
in freeing some space which is not a total block). sometimes we really
wants to
comment the lines which make the panic error in that file and recompile the
kernel :)

And now we just limit the number of the SMTP connections and the system
seems stable,and may
be we will upgrade it to 3.0 later,but we are really want to find out the
reason of the problem,as we
really spend much time on it,but it's so hard to dig into the code .......

And we think maybe the dumping of the crash is not needed,because the
problem must be happened
sometime before the crash,and maybe the core couldn't help to find out the
problem.



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