From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 28 12:31:34 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA00499 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 12:31:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from nora.pcug.co.uk (Nora.PCUG.CO.UK [192.68.174.71]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA00491 for ; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 12:31:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from imdb.demon.co.uk by nora.pcug.co.uk id aa20053; 28 Oct 96 20:26 GMT Message-Id: <199610281957.TAA10074> Subject: server death when swap space is all gone. To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 19:57:03 +0000 (GMT) From: Rob Hartill Organization: Internet Movie Database Reply-To: robh@imdb.com X-pgp-public-key: http://us.imdb.com/pgp.html X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk A couple of time now I've seen Freebsd (2.1.0 and 2.1.5-STABLE) collapse into a smouldering mess after user processes consume all available swap space. A web server went belly up last night because of this. Why can't the OS recover from this ?. The memory hungry processes die off eventually, but instead the machine locks up and needs to be rebooted. On a related note, a Linux using friend takes pleasure in telling me that FreeBSD is brian-dead w.r.t memory management because it can't diff a couple of 20Mb files on a machine with ample memory and swap (combined). Are there any kernel tweaks in the area that could be useful ? thanks. rob