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Date:      Tue, 28 Mar 2000 21:37:54 -0800
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        gerti-freebsds@bitart.com
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Random signal 9 (SIGKILL), please help!
Message-ID:  <20000328213754.L21029@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <20000329043747.3094.qmail@camelot.bitart.com>; from gerti@bitart.com on Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 10:37:46PM -0600
References:  <20000329041104.3028.qmail@camelot.bitart.com> <20000328204948.K21029@fw.wintelcom.net> <20000329043747.3094.qmail@camelot.bitart.com>

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* Gerd Knops <gerti@bitart.com> [000328 21:03] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> > * Gerd Knops <gerti@bitart.com> [000328 20:36] wrote:
> > > Only on the FreeBSD systems I see that child processes occasionaly
> > > get killed bya signal 9, and I just can't figure out why.
> > >
> > > Syslog does not give any indication. The machines do not swap (I
> > > know processes mayget killed when the systems run out of swap
> > > space). The times at which the processesare killed does seem to
> > > be random, meaning it does not seem dome house keeping codethat
> > > causes it.
> > >
> > > The processes are spawned from various daemons, and are killed
> > > at different pointsin their existence, even when just barely
> > > started and no resources to mention areconsumed yet.
> > >
> > > All processes run as root, so 'limit' should not be the cause.
> > >
> > > Is there anything else but the swapper that can trigger a 'signal
> > > 9' to be sent toprocesses?
> > >
> > > The systems in question run a variety of versions, starting from
> > > 3.2 Release to afairly recent (4 weeks) 3.4 stable.
> > >
> > This is on all the FreeBSD systems?  This is really confusing I've
> > _never_ heard of this happening, do you have any machines built
> > with the same _exact_ hardware exibiting the same problems or not?
> >
> Nope, different hardware, all Intel CPUs, some Pentium Pro, some
> Pentium II, ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards.
> 
> > Have you tried 4.0?  Without some sample code this is going to
> > be very hard to reproduce.
> >
> The code is >50k lines of perl... No I have not tried 4.0 yet. And
> I can not reproduce the problem either, it just randomly appears
> at a very low rate. 23 machines running FreeBSD, and I see about 1
> to 3 of those a day.
> 
> > Are you sure you aren't running out of process slots?  What is
> > maxusers set to in the kernel?
> 
> 64.

Try maybe 128?

> 
> > How many processes typically run at the same time?
> >
> Varying, the busiest machine peaks at about 100 processes, but I
> have seen it on machines running only 50 processes.
> 
> Thanks for responding!

I've never heard of signal 9 "by accident" and since this problem
happens on a variety of 3.x systems 3.2-3.4 (3.4-stable also?)
it seems really weird.

I don't think I can be of very much help without access to the 
code and the machines running it, as well as how it is being
run, apache+cgi?

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]


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