From owner-freebsd-bugs  Fri Apr  3 21:40:24 1998
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Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 22:40:10 -0700 (MST)
From: Steve Grandi <grandi@noao.edu>
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Reply-To: Steve Grandi <grandi@noao.edu>
To: Vince Vielhaber <vev@michvhf.com>
cc: bugs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Running out of places to turn...
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On Fri, 3 Apr 1998, Vince Vielhaber wrote:

> 
> For a quick rundown, I installed 2.2.5 from CD on a P150 (Tyan MB) with
> 256MB Ram, a 4GB and 6.4GB IDE and a pair of 9GB SCSI drives connected
> to a 2940UW (that I have set to a max transfer rate of 10Mbps).  This is
> a news machine and I have the the ccd driver configured into the kernel
> and I'm running the 2-9GB drives as one 18GB drive.  The other kernel
> changes are maxusers set to 256 and the mem size items set at 262100.
> 

I was having similar problems....

How long does the expire take?  My system would work fine as long as the
expire would take a few minutes; but then something would happen and the
expires would start taking 8 hours!  And the system would soon crash;
somtimes a hard lock up and sometimes with the same "page fault in Kernel
mode" that you see.

I finally figured it out...at least my system hasn't crashed for over a
month.  When expire is rebuilding the history file, it tries to fit the
history.pag file in core.  If it can't, expire resorts to using a disk
file which is horribly inefficient and stresses the system something
fierce...apparently enough to tickle a latent bug in FreeBSD that causes
a subsequent crash. 

The solution, a common one for 2.2.5+ problems, is to edit /etc/login.conf;
in particular the news entry.  Here is what my entry now looks like:

#
# Settings used by news subsystem
#
news:\
	:path=/usr/local/news/bin /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin:\
	:cputime=infinity:\
	:datasize=infinity:\
	:datasize-cur=infinity:\
	:stacksize=64M:\
	:stacksize-cur=64M:\
	:memorylocked=64M:\
	:memoryuse=128M:\
	:memoryuse-cur=128M:\
	:filesize=infinity:\
	:coredumpsize=infinity:\
	:openfiles=512:\
	:maxproc=128:\
	:priority=0:\
	:requirehome@:\
	:umask=022:\
	:tc=auth-root-defaults:

Steve Grandi, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson, Arizona USA
Internet: grandi@noao.edu  Voice: +1 520 318-8228


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