From owner-freebsd-isp Wed Feb 25 10:08:56 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id KAA09614 for freebsd-isp-outgoing; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:08:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from ns1.netcorps.com (ns1.netcorps.com [207.1.125.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA09594 for ; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:08:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from satya@gho.st) Received: from localhost (satya@localhost) by ns1.netcorps.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id KAA08580 for ; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:04:43 -0800 (PST) X-Authentication-Warning: ns1.netcorps.com: satya owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:04:43 -0800 (PST) From: Satya Palani X-Sender: satya@ns1.netcorps.com Reply-To: Satya Palani To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: BSD crashes under load Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Recently, we've been having a large number of crashes on our FreeBSD 2.2.x web servers; unpleasant crashes, where someone has to come in and fix it at the console. Specifically, it's happening on our web-hosting machines (running either 2.2.1 or 2.2.5), each of which are hosting several hundred customers. The problem seems to be disk related. There is no panic message in the log (or any message, for that matter); the machines simply spontaneously reboot, fail the filesystem check, and drop into single-user mode. At this point, running fsck brings up a long list of duplicate inodes/files in the /usr slice. I would initially consider this to be problem with the drive; however, replacing the drive on one server didn't fix it, and another machine that was just added a week ago is starting to display this behavior as well. This sort of thing should not be happening on a brand-new drive. So, what it looks like to me: different processes are trying to write to the same disk sector and are killing the machine. Since we have a lot of customers ftp'ing their sites to the servers, there is a *lot* of disk activity going on, and I'm wondering if it's too much for FreeBSD to handle... Does the OS get confused if more than a few people are transfering data to or from it? Has anyone else experienced anything like this? We're using Adaptec 2940 SCSI controllers and Quantum Atlas II drives, so I don't think hardware quality is an issue... Satya NetCorps To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message