System crashes under heavy disk i/o

[Erik Norgaard]

Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Hi--
> 
> On Dec 17, 2009, at 1:26 PM, Erik Norgaard wrote:
>> FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p1 #0: Fri Dec 11 11:53:19 CET 2009
>>    norgaard at localhost:/usr/local/obj/usr/local/src/sys/GENERIC
>> Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
>> CPU: VIA Nehemiah (800.04-MHz 686-class CPU)
>>  Origin = "CentaurHauls"  Id = 0x69a  Stepping = 10
>> real memory  = 268435456 (256 MB)
>> avail memory = 231383040 (220 MB)
>> atapci0: <VIA 6420 SATA150 controller>
>> ad6: 476940MB <Seagate ST3500320NS SN04> at ata3-master SATA150
>>
>> In normal operation I have no problem, but when performing intensive read or write for a prolonged time the system crashes. This happens also even if the partition is read-only. The crash occurs both with single large files (1GB) as well as many small files (10kb-10MB).
> 
> That's probably a sign of either thermal problems from inadequate cooling, or possibly PSU not giving stable voltage rails and sagging a bit too low; also, at least the older VIA C3 EPIA hardware had somewhat flaky PATA interfaces; if I tried to use both PATA channels I'd see lockups, unless I turned everything down to UDMA-33 speeds.  

I doubt it's the cooling, processor is currently at 48C with passive 
cooling. But it could be PSU, I got the system for low power fanless 
silent operation, but after having disk crashes with laptop disks under 
heavy i/o, I got a server disk to sustain the continuous use.

I'll try to slow it down and see if it helps, thanks for the advice.

Erik

-- 
Erik Nørgaard
Ph: +34.666334818/+34.915211157                  http://www.locolomo.org