From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Apr 5 12:48:30 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA26782 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 5 Apr 1997 12:48:30 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id MAA26777 for ; Sat, 5 Apr 1997 12:48:27 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA23575; Sat, 5 Apr 1997 13:29:45 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199704052029.NAA23575@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: 2.2.1R NFS and FTP load problem FOUND To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 13:29:45 -0700 (MST) Cc: terry@lambert.org, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970405104824.00a54100@etinc.com> from "dennis" at Apr 5, 97 10:48:26 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >More likely, your RAM is flakey, and you are simply changing the > >usage pattern such that the flakey RAM is no longer critical path. > > > >Any chance of you playing a game of "shuffle the SIMMs" to verify > >this? > > As I said, 2 different machines were involved, so the likelihood of > it being flakey ram is rather unlikely. Plus the same ram was used > when it works (just added another bank)..... The same code was not necessarily loaded into the same spot. If there was more RAM, the code exhibiting the problem could have been loaded into the additional RAM instead of the flakey RAM. This would depend highly on the exact usage patter by processes invoked during install, including, but not limited to, their invocation order, etc.. There is no evidence, short of a shuffle, that will guarantee you that the problem is resolved, not masked by the additional RAM. You will need to do a full shuffle so that an 8M situation without the possibly flakey RAM is also tested (and verified to fail). Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.