System crashes under heavy disk i/o

[Mel Flynn]

On Thursday 17 December 2009 12:26:12 Erik Norgaard wrote:

> My two questions:
> 
> - is there any utility that I can use monitor the system to see what's
> going on, when or why?

gstat(8)
Also, perhaps syslog to a different machine or nfs mount /var/log if you feel 
you're missing a log message due to this error.

> - is there any way that I can slow down the disk i/o?

Turn down operating mode via atacontrol. If using dump(8) use the cache 
feature and/or do the backup from live disk, so no other services are running 
and disk isn't accessed other then by dump.
-- 
Mel