server locks up when unable to allocate swap

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Sat Sep 17 14:23:09 PDT 2005


snacktime wrote:
> 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?

You ran out of swapspace, probably.  How big is your swap partition, and did 
you notice unusually high number of processes running?

You are running a version of FreeBSD which is significantly out-of-date, and 
you ought to consider updating to 4.11.  You should also update your ports or 
at least run portaudit to see whether the Apache, MySQL, and so forth are OK.

-- 
-Chuck


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