Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 19:35:01 +0100 From: Mark Ovens <mark@ukug.uk.freebsd.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Recovering from "out of swap space" Message-ID: <20000422193501.A232@parish>
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Yesterday whilst running several instances of Netscape and Acroread my
machine hung. There was several minutes of endless disk thrashing, but
no response from the keyboard or mouse. Trying to switch to a ttyv
resulted in a blank screen. Despite waiting ~10 minutes after the disk
thrashing stopped I resorted to the good old 3-finger salute.
Checking /var/log/messages after re-booting I found:
Apr 22 05:04:24 parish /kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space
Apr 22 05:04:24 parish /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
OK, I know the cause and the solution, but what I am curious about is
why can't FreeBSD handle this situation? I would have expected it to
kill the process that needed the swap, or at least allow me to switch
to a ttyv and kill processes manually.
Curiously, it did shutdown cleanly as no fs errors appeared (and fsck
didn't run) when it re-started.
Is there any way to recover from an out of swap situation without
resorting to a reboot?
# uname -a
FreeBSD parish 4.0-STABLE FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE #1:
Sat Mar 18 18:53:40 GMT 2000
mark@parish:/usr/src/sys/compile/PARISH i386
#
--
...and on the eighth day God created UNIX
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