Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 27 Nov 2000 18:28:39 -0500 (EST)
From:      Bosko Milekic <bmilekic@technokratis.com>
To:        Ferdinand Goldmann <ferdl@atommuell.oeh.uni-linz.ac.at>
Cc:        freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Strange lockups with Dummynet
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011271825480.57657-100000@jehovah.technokratis.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011272136540.90661-100000@atommuell.oeh.uni-linz.ac.at>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

  Hi Ferdinand,

  	A fix for this was recently committed to -CURRENT and yesterday to
  -STABLE. A related fix is about to be committed but yesterday's fix
  should fix the problems you describe below alone.
	I am not 100% certain that this "lockup" you describe is exactly the
  problem I'm referring to, because this problem usually results in a page
  fault. If it isn't, I'd appreciate it if you could make sure your kernel
  is compiled with debugging support and try and get a crash dump. If it's
  a complete lockup, you're likely to not get anything and in that case, I
  would begin by checking the hardware.

On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Ferdinand Goldmann wrote:

> Hello.
> 
> I am experiencing strange crashes on a machine which is being heavily used
> as a traffic shaper serving about 300 clients. The machine itsself is just
> an old Pentium machine, NICs are:
> 
> tx0: <SMC EtherPower II 10/100> port 0x6200-0x62ff mem 0xe1000000-0xe1000fff irq 11 at device 18.0 on pci0
> miibus0: <MII bus> on tx0
> nsphy0: <QS6612 10/100 media interface> on miibus0
> nsphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
> tx0: address 00:e0:29:39:bb:ab, type SMC9432BTX
> xl0: <3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0x6300-0x637f mem 0xe1001000-0xe100107f irq 9 at device 19.0 on pci0
> xl0: Ethernet address: 00:50:da:0d:a8:a7
> miibus1: <MII bus> on xl0
> xlphy0: <3c905C 10/100 internal PHY> on miibus1
> xlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
> 
> Occasionally, I see these in the logs: (I hear this is due to hardware being
> too slow to respond to feed the NIC, which could be possible (P166))
> 
> xl0: transmission error: 90
> xl0: tx underrun, increasing tx start threshold to 120 bytes
> 
> I have set the following kernel parameters:
> maxusers        96
> options         NMBCLUSTERS=4096
> 
> I beefed up NMBCLUSTERS because FreeBSD ran out of them with the default
> setting.
> 
> Currently:
> # netstat -m
> 637/1472/16384 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
> 187 mbufs allocated to data
> 450 mbufs allocated to packet headers
> 186/934/4096 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
> 2236 Kbytes allocated to network (23% in use)
> 
> I have configured between 3 and 4 pipes on this machine and declared
> a small ruleset which should shape the traffic according to my
> expectations.
> 
> Today, I experienced the following: Upon adding a new pipe definition,
> the machine locked maybe an eyeblink after the command was set off.
> I.e., the machine was not ping'able anymore, and the console was
> dead. However, the activity LEDs of the NICs were still flashing.
> No kernel entries, nothing...
> This has happened already once after rising the NMBCLUSTERS value.
> Being paranoid, I have been logging this value to a file, but it does not
> seem to rise significantly before the crash.
> 
> [Q]: Can the change of NMBCLUSTERS be the cause for my lockup
> problem, or could this be a dummynet problem? How do people running
> sites with lots of traffic setting the values of maxusers and
> NMBCLUSTERS to be safe, and what would be the maximum value for
> maxusers (I heard long it is instable > 128)?
> General question, how stable is dummynet under heavy load, any experiences
> there?
> BTW, the machine is also doing port forwarding of HTTP connects to a proxy.
> 
> TIA for any hints,
> Ferdinand Goldmann

  Regards,
  Bosko Milekic
  bmilekic@technokratis.com




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.4.21.0011271825480.57657-100000>