Server overloaded? Or is it a bug?

[Daniela]

On Tuesday 03 June 2003 16:49, Erik Paulsen Skaalerud wrote:

Thanks for your reply.

> > Hi all!
>
> Hi
>
> > I need your help.
>
> Ok. You should ask generic questions like this on
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org, as its not directly rleated to
> FreeBSD-STABLE.

I thought it might be some bug in -STABLE.

> > My server doesn't respond any more. Everything crashed.
> > How can I find out if this is a bug or it is simply overloaded?
>
> Did you try looking at its console?
> It probably have lots of pretty messages of whats going on..

Can't look at the console. It hangs completely.

> > I don't have much running, just KDE with about 10 programs
> > on each of the 16 desktops, and a few background processes.
> > This seems much, but I often have much more stuff running,
> > and it is not even slow.
> >
> > It does respond when I ping it, but won't let me in over SSH.
> > The processor doesn't sound busy, so I suspect that the
> > scheduler has gone away, or there is some bug in the kernel,
> > or some system table is too small.
>
> Hm. What kind of sound does a busy CPU make? :-)
>
> > How do I find out what the problem is? (Never had any
> > before.)
>
> Yeah, attach a console and find out whats going on.

How can I do that?
It doesn't respond to ctrl+alt+backspace and ctrl+alt+del, I can still move 
the mouse, but I can't click anything. (I known I shouldn't run X11 on a 
server.)

> > FreeBSD has always managed the highest loads, even
> > on normal PC hardware. Is it possible to bring the server
> > back without rebooting? I would lose a lot of unsaved data if
> > I had to reboot. I'm running 4.8-STABLE.
>
> When a server responds to ping, but ssh times out etc it often relates to
> hdd problems. Atleast in my experiences it has been so (dead disk). And if
> it is hdd problems, and FreeBSD couldnt get the disk to wake up again, you
> probably already have lost data.

That could be the cause. One minute before the crash I could still enter shell 
builtin commands, but external commands did just nothing.

Is it possible that the process table is full (I had more than 450 processes 
last time I ran top) or I ran out of memory (512M RAM + 1024M swap)?

> > Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> > Daniela