Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 23 Dec 1999 21:19:41 +0000 (GMT) | From | Dale Amon <> | Subject | Re: I Give Up! |
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Over the years I've seen problems like this crop up. It's a memory leak and it could be in the kernel or it could be in one of your own user land programs. I'm currently battling one in a Perl sourced daemon that leaks enough to go into a swap thrashing lockup every 6 days. We fixed it temporarily with a 6 day cron job reboot...
Back in 2.0.28-32 days we had one server, basically the same as all the other servers, same software versions... the went into swap lockup every couple days. It also had a BIOS problem: soft reboot did not work. We solved that one with a cron job halt and a mechanical timer that power cycled it after the halt... The things you do in an engineering/production environment when The Show Must Go On...
That one was almost certainly a kernel leak. It just went away with the later 2.0.3x versions.
I'd keep a top running on the machine. When the lockup approaches you actually have loads of time to react if you are watching.
Keep an eye out for a particular process that is continuosly increasing in size until it is too big for swap. If you don't see one, then the leak is in the kernel and you can tell that from the changes in the memory and swap usage.
Worst comes to worst, a programmed reboot at 3am is less disruptive than a locked up machine at 4pm.
------------------------------------------------------ Use Linux: A computer Dale Amon, CEO/MD is a terrible thing Village Networking Ltd to waste. Belfast, Northern Ireland ------------------------------------------------------
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