Server overloaded? Or is it a bug?

[Daniela]

On Tuesday 03 June 2003 20:13, Mike Hoskins wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Daniela wrote:
> > My server doesn't respond any more. Everything crashed.
>
> Did the system wedge hard, or did X just lockup?  Does ctrl-alt-backspace
> do anything?  That will often kill X if it's misbehaving.  More
> information about your hardware might also help someone spot potential
> problems.

I'm certain that X is not the problem. It's either a bug in the system, or, 
more likely, I ran out of a needed resource.

> > How can I find out if this is a bug or it is simply overloaded?
>
> You said this has never happened before...  Were you running anything or
> doing anything that might coincide with the crash?  Crash may not be the
> right word...  The first thing is deciding if it's really the OS, or some
> application that's caused the behavior.

Yes, it was the first time I extracted .zip files. I didn't do anything 
special.

> > 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.
>
> What's the load average look like?  Are these network or I/O heavy
> programs, or just "simple" applications?

Load average is mostly something around 3.50, and the applications are mainly 
programming tools, lots of open shells, many browser windows, many tools for 
3D graphics (network rendering, ...) and seven different servers.

> > It does respond when I ping it, but won't let me in over SSH.
>
> Can you login locally?  Are the consoles unresponsive?  Was anything
> printed on the console, particularly bright-white text?  :)

Login hanged after the password prompt and nothing was on the console (that 
was a short time before the system became completely unresponsive).

> > 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.
>
> If the disk, network, etc. are quiet and the machine in unresponsive to
> console input...  Your only option may be a reboot and a thorough
> investigation afterwards.
>
> > I would lose a lot of unsaved data if I had to reboot.
>
> Eek.  Save often, regardless of OS.  ;)

I'm sure this was only an exception. And I'm lazy.