Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 21:31:06 +0100 (MET) From: Robert Eckardt <roberte@mep.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> To: gpalmer@freebsd.org (Gary Palmer) Cc: robh@imdb.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: server death when swap space is all gone. Message-ID: <199610312031.VAA00837@ghost.mep.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> In-Reply-To: <29680.846740897@orion.webspan.net> from Gary Palmer at "31. Oct. 96 0:45:21"
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> > 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. I also experienced mysterious lockups. Running 2.1.5 on 16MB with 80 MB Swap, I was almost always short of memory (after a few days uptime). When some jobs required more memory (Netscape, Reduce, ghostscript) it caused several times one of the first processes to be killed -- which was usually Xserver, xdm, ... (I think so.) Thus, sometimes I would find the video card messed up (having to reboot blindly), sometimes I would find myself in text mode (but everything else was also killed :-( :-( ). On other occasions the machine was simply irresponsive, only hitting reset or power cycling would help. (the X-screen was simply frozen) I think something else must have been killed. However, maybe something else caused a panic and I was dropped to the debugger, which was "hidden" under the graphics screen ??? (How do people handle panics under X with debugger compiled in ?) Now I'm using 100MB swap and add sometimes a 40MB file on a DOS partition as swap. No problems since then, as I keep an eye on swap now. Hope, this description gives an idea. Any suggestions ? Robert -- Robert Eckardt \\ FreeBSD -- solutions for a large universe.(tm) RobertE@MEP.Ruhr-Uni-Bochum.de \\ What do you want to boot tomorrow ?(tm) http://WWW.MEP.Ruhr-Uni-Bochum.de/~roberte For PGP-key finger roberte@gluon.MEP.Ruhr-Uni-Bochum.de
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