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Date:      Wed, 5 Sep 2001 23:11:31 -0700
From:      Rob Hudson <rob@euglug.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   4.3 Dropping Cores
Message-ID:  <20010905231131.C11014@cogit8.org>

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Hello,

What are the common reasons for a server to suddenly start dropping
core files?  This server has been running for many months, upgrading
from 4.1 -> 4.2 -> 4.3.  Just recently I added some extra RAM from 2
64 MB DIMMs to 1 256 MB DIMM & 1 128 MB DIMM.  My first thought is
that maybe one of the sticks is bad?  Are there any memory integrity
checkers for FreeBSD?

Here is an example from my /var/log/messages:

Aug 19 02:00:12 saaz /kernel: pid 563 (egrep), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 00:07:19 saaz /kernel: pid 3662 (perl), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 05:38:31 saaz /kernel: pid 4661 (smtpd), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 06:30:00 saaz /kernel: pid 4778 (sh), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 06:30:00 saaz /kernel: pid 4776 (sh), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 08:00:00 saaz /kernel: pid 5074 (sh), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 08:25:00 saaz /kernel: pid 5173 (sh), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 20 08:53:58 saaz /kernel: pid 5258 (popa3d), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 21 21:00:33 saaz /kernel: pid 10599 (perl), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 22 07:51:51 saaz /kernel: pid 12372 (cleanup), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 22 18:00:33 saaz /kernel: pid 613 (perl), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 22 18:46:35 saaz /kernel: pid 723 (cleanup), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 24 05:59:58 saaz /kernel: pid 5976 (cleanup), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Sep  1 05:23:39 saaz /kernel: pid 37413 (flush), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Sep  2 00:00:59 saaz /kernel: pid 39904 (perl), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Sep  3 02:00:45 saaz /kernel: pid 43679 (egrep), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)


Another clue, possibly:  I was running seti@home for a little while
with a nice value of 20.  I'm not running any critical services and I
figured I'd rack up some work units.  When this ran for a while, the
number of dropped cores increased a lot.  I stopped running it on the
server, thinking this was the problem, but I'm still getting an
unusual number of core dumps.  Now my thinking is that the seti@home
used the system resources more and caused whatever problem my server
has to come out of the woodwork more often.

Thanks for any help,
Rob

Random Quote:
------------
Ever wake up feeling like a null pointer? -Allan Pratt

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