server locks up when unable to allocate swap

snacktime snacktime at gmail.com
Sat Sep 17 11:57:36 PDT 2005


A FBSD 4.7 server this morning locked up and when I got to the data center I 
found a bunch of IO error messages saying the pager couldn't allocate needed 
swap space (or something close to that). Unfortunately these messages didn't 
get logged anywhere that I could find and I didn't have anything on me to 
write them down. The server has 500mb ram and is usually using about 70% of 
that. The server didn't panic, but the console was not responsive so I had 
to do a cold reboot. Everything came back up fine.

Any ideas on how to debug this further? This server has run with the same 
configuration (apache/zope/mysql/qmail) for about 2 years without any 
issues. If something did actually use up all the swap, would what happened 
be normal behavior? 

Chris


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