From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Oct 30 21:49:27 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id VAA29757 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 30 Oct 1996 21:49:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.webspan.net (mail.webspan.net [206.154.70.7]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA29747 for ; Wed, 30 Oct 1996 21:49:23 -0800 (PST) Received: from orion.webspan.net (orion.webspan.net [206.154.70.5]) by mail.webspan.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA08904; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 00:48:17 -0500 (EST) Received: from orion.webspan.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by orion.webspan.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA29683; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 00:48:17 -0500 (EST) To: robh@imdb.com cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: "Gary Palmer" Subject: Re: server death when swap space is all gone. In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 28 Oct 1996 19:57:03 GMT." <199610281957.TAA10074> Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 00:48:17 -0500 Message-ID: <29680.846740897@orion.webspan.net> Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Rob Hartill wrote in message ID <199610281957.TAA10074>: > > A couple of time now I've seen Freebsd (2.1.0 and 2.1.5-STABLE) collapse > into a smouldering mess after user processes consume all available swap space > . > > A web server went belly up last night because of this. > Why can't the OS recover from this ?. The memory hungry processes die > off eventually, but instead the machine locks up and needs to be rebooted. I'm curious to hear this ... I often run my workstation out of memory (too conservative on swap allocation) and NEVER have a lockup problem. Same with the news box, which sometimes runs out of memory for some strange reason. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info