From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Dec 19 9:39:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-31-201-166.mmcable.com [65.31.201.166]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D22FD37B59E for ; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 09:38:59 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 68190 invoked by uid 100); 19 Dec 2001 17:38:59 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15392.53426.648102.428853@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:38:58 -0600 To: Cleto Pescia Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Out of swap space on FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE In-Reply-To: <33045463@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA v0.42/Python 2.1.1 (freebsd4) From: "Mike Meyer" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Cleto Pescia types: > Yesterday I ran into a strange problem on a moderately loaded FreeBSD > 4.3R mail server (about 5K messages / week). I suddendly got the following > error message: > > Dec 18 16:48:55 mailhost /kernel: swap_pager: out of swap space > Dec 18 16:48:55 mailhost /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed > > And then I had no other option than to press the hardware Reset button. > There was no way to access the machine. > After rebooting the server went on to work as before, without any further > problems. > The machine is an IDE-based Pentium 200MHz with sendmail 8.11 / qpopper > 2.53, and at the time of the crash had an uptime of about 150 days. > The swap partition is 132 MB. > I'm rather clueless about where to look to find the cause for the crash... > I found no *.core files. > Any idea? Yeah - you ran out of swap space. Something you're running probably has a memory leak. You need to monitor memory usage of the various long-running daemons to figure out what it is, and fix that. Matt Dillon did some work on making the system more stable when it runs out of swap recently; you might consider upgrading the entire system to 4.5 when that comes out. What this means is that instead of your system locking up when you run out of swap, random processes will get killed. This at least gives you a chance to figure out what ran you out of virtual. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message