server locks up when unable to allocate swap

snacktime snacktime at gmail.com
Sat Sep 17 20:59:12 PDT 2005


On 9/17/05, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?


1 GB swap, 500mb ram. I looked in the logs for all the processes that were 
running and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. My feeling is that I 
ran out of swap also, although it's bugging me because I can't yet find what 
caused it.


You are running a version of FreeBSD which is significantly out-of-date, and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.


All the ports are up to date. I've been putting off upgrading the server, 
but it does have most of the security patches applied.

Chris

--
> -Chuck
>


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