Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 13:53:52 +0000 (GMT) From: Rob Hartill <robh@imdb.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: gpalmer@freebsd.org Subject: Re: server death when swap space is all gone. Message-ID: <199610311353.NAA02231> In-Reply-To: <29680.846740897@orion.webspan.net> from "Gary Palmer" at Oct 31, 96 00:48:17 am
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Gary Palmer wrote: >Rob Hartill wrote in message ID ><199610281957.TAA10074>: >> >> 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. > >I'm curious to hear this ... I often run my workstation out of memory >(too conservative on swap allocation) and NEVER have a lockup >problem. Same with the news box, which sometimes runs out of memory >for some strange reason. I had some httpd processes that grew and grew and grew. The remote machine locked up for over 6 hours (nobody there to attend to it). In that time no cron jobs ran. I had a cron job that was supposed to ping other local machines to check for problems and reboot if it lost all contact with the outside world for too long. It's a little worrying that this could be triggered by malicious users who try to grab all the swap space in an attempt to take down the machine. rob