Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:55:04 +1000 From: "Peter Ross" <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> To: "Adam Vande More" <amvandemore@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Network problems while running VirtualBox Message-ID: <20110714115504.20182xr8y5z7o3ug@webmail.in-berlin.de> In-Reply-To: <CA%2BtpaK3KXivGBEXxQQPPgUj0Ptt3Gadd%2BK2BT0Xg74RDfb42kA@mail.gmail.com> References: <20110714095717.35581xj4rdju1pel@webmail.in-berlin.de> <CA%2BtpaK3KXivGBEXxQQPPgUj0Ptt3Gadd%2BK2BT0Xg74RDfb42kA@mail.gmail.com>
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Quoting "Adam Vande More" <amvandemore@gmail.com>: > On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Peter Ross > <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de>wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> I have a problem with the network while running VirtualBox. >> >> As soon as I _run_ a VirtualBox I am not able to copy large files (e.g. >> virtual disks or ZFS snapshots) using ssh/scp to another machine. >> >> The ssh crashes with "Write failed: Cannot allocate memory" >> <snip> >> At the moment it is a real showstopper for running VirtualBox/FreeBSD >> production because I cannot backup VirtualBoxes. Mahlon gave up on it and >> uses Citrix by now (but is still keen to have this solved). >> >> Any idea what causes the problem? I am happy to gather information, >> applying patches etc. if it helps. >> > > Just a thought, does using ssh from ports make any difference? I am running named on the same box. I have overtime some errors there as well: Apr 13 05:17:41 bind named[23534]: internal_send: 192.168.50.145#65176: Cannot allocate memory Jun 21 23:30:44 bind named[39864]: internal_send: 192.168.50.251#36155: Cannot allocate memory Jun 24 15:28:00 bind named[39864]: internal_send: 192.168.50.251#28651: Cannot allocate memory Jun 28 12:57:52 bind named[2462]: internal_send: 192.168.165.154#1201: Cannot allocate memory Jul 13 19:43:05 bind named[4032]: internal_send: 192.168.167.147#52736: Cannot allocate memory coming from a sendmsg(2). My theory there is: my scp sends a lot data at the same time while the named is sending a lot of data over time - both increasing the likelyhood of the error. > Do you have > any more info about the threshold of file size for when this problem starts > occurring? is it always the same? No, it varies. Usually after a few GB. E.g. he last one lasted 11GB but I had failures below 8GB transfer before. The system itself is quite stable regarding running processes and memory usage otherwise, here the description of it: This machine is running: - DHCP server (host) - NTP server (host) - Nagios monitor (nagios jail) - DNS server (bind jail) - MySQL server (mysql jail) - Apache server with ITWiki (apache jail) - Admin mail server (adminmail jail) - Zimbra 7.0 Mail server (zimbra VirtualBox) The machine has 8GB of RAM, and the footprint of the jails is minimal (the MySQL server is for the mediawiki only which is used by two people at the moment and not heavily). Here a top(1) sorted by size: last pid: 30169; load averages: 0.38, 0.41, 0.41 up 8+19:04:43 11:51:39 159 processes: 1 running, 158 sleeping CPU: 0.4% user, 0.0% nice, 0.4% system, 0.0% interrupt, 99.2% idle Mem: 84M Active, 356M Inact, 4516M Wired, 1004K Cache, 33M Buf, 2943M Free Swap: 8188M Total, 8188M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 92688 root 24 44 0 2078M 1991M IPRT S 8 18.3H 5.86% VBoxHeadle 4768 88 16 51 0 213M 21672K sigwai 8 2:02 0.00% mysqld 57180 www 1 46 0 140M 10344K accept 3 0:00 0.00% httpd 6223 www 1 76 0 139M 2400K accept 14 0:09 0.00% httpd 78674 www 1 44 0 138M 27056K accept 9 0:02 0.00% httpd 78924 www 1 44 0 138M 25928K accept 8 0:02 0.00% httpd 36114 www 1 44 0 138M 25424K accept 2 0:01 0.00% httpd 3997 www 1 44 0 138M 25180K accept 1 0:00 0.00% httpd 57410 www 1 44 0 138M 24476K accept 8 0:01 0.00% httpd 48202 www 1 44 0 138M 18488K accept 10 0:00 0.00% httpd 29695 www 1 44 0 134M 4920K accept 8 0:00 0.00% httpd > EG if Vbox has 2 GB mapped out and you > get an error at a certain file size, does reducing the Vbox memory footprint > allow a larger file to be successfully sent? Given that the amount of data is randomly just now I cannot imagine how to get reliable numbers in this experiment. While I am doing it I monitored the memory usage using top and vmstat but there does not seem to be a shortage. I also tried lookbusy to occupy 2GB when VisualBox wasn't running. I even put slightly more pressure on it as VirtualBox does (that means the free memory was below the typical numbers when VirtualBox was running) - but the result is the same: It works as long as I do not start the VirtualBox. Regards Peter
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