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Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 15:05:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
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To: Steve Shorter <steve@nomad.tor.lets.net>
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Subject: Re: vnode_pager_putpages errors and DOS?
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On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Steve Shorter wrote:

> > 	I have some machines that run customers cgi stuff.
> > These machines have started to hang and become unresponsive.
> > At first I thought it was a hardware issue, but I discovered in 
> > a cyclades log the following stuff that got logged to the
> > console which explains the cause of the system hangs/failures.
> > 
> > vnode_pager_putpages: residual I/O 65536 at 347
> > vnode_pager_putpages: I/O error 28]
> > vnode_pager_putpages: residual I/O 65536 at 285] 
> 
> 	Aha! also at the same time I get in syslog
> 
> 	/kernel: pid 6 (syncer), uid 0 on /chroot/tmp: file system full
> 
> 	Whats happening? Can a full filesystem bring the thing down? 
> Ideas? Fixes? 

Ideally not, but many UNIX programs respond poorly to being out of memory
and disk space ("No space, wot?").  Are you using a swap file, and if so,
how did you create the swapfile?  Are you using sparse files much?

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research