Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 11:30:54 +0000 () From: Eric Yagerlener <eyager@novagate.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: vm_fault bug in 2.1.0? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970408104952.199A-100000@localhost>
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I have a problem with FreeBSD 2.1.0 that might be a well known problem, or as a result of me pushing the system beyond capacity. I have 32M of ram and and 27M of swap. The error is easily reproducable. I logged in as root and did the following command on a directory that contained 35 files that were 11.6M long total and were compressed with 'compress'. zcat * |less Things work well and I'm able to scroll through the files. I decide to go searching for keywords through all these files using less's search command. It works fine at first, but as you get closer to the end of the files, things get gradually slower and slower. Finally it reaches the point to where the system will suddenly do nothing but disk swapping, and all other processes are completely dead in the water and eventually die because of the lack of memory. However, less won't die and keeps on thrashing away despite all the vm_faults it's generating. My guess is that less is spawning a child process that will thrash the system until a vm_fault occurs kills that child process, less will simply ignore it and create another one that does the exact same thing an infinite amount of times. You can't kill less because you don't have enough memory to execute ps or the kill command. The only way of shutting down is to hit control-alt-delete. Here's are the kernel messages. Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 63 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: swap_pager: out of space Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden last message repeated 4 times Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 648 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 649 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 650 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 651 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 652 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 653 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 654 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 96 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 655 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 656 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap Is this the vm_fault bug that I heard mention of? eyager@novagate.com
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