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Date:      Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:06:07 +0200
From:      Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>
To:        alk@pobox.com, wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG, dg@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: inetd is ill? syslogd is anemic?
Message-ID:  <19981010200607.56951@follo.net>
In-Reply-To: <13854.56585.707371.316487@avalon.east>; from Tony Kimball on Fri, Oct 09, 1998 at 11:06:40PM -0500
References:  <13854.19308.314677.685227@avalon.east> <199810092335.TAA25121@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <13854.56585.707371.316487@avalon.east>

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On Fri, Oct 09, 1998 at 11:06:40PM -0500, Tony Kimball wrote:
> Quoth Garrett Wollman on Fri, 9 October:
> : <<On Fri,  9 Oct 1998 12:55:47 -0500 (CDT), Tony Kimball <anthony.kimball@Sun.COM> said:
> : 
> : > This has been occurring for almost a week -- of a sudden, I get a few
> : > hundred of these:
> : >   Oct  9 12:30:22 avalon /kernel: pid 756 (inetd), uid 0: exited on signal 11
> : 
> : Buy more memory.
> 
> I don't believe it.  There is more than 100MB of swap free at this point,
> and it is still happening.

This is a known, OLD bug.  It was one of the bugs introduced or
exposed by John Dysons changes to the VM system.  He was working on
this at the time he left, if I understood correctly.

In some cases, the VM system goes awry when you go out of memory.
This seems especially common if it is netscape that eats the memory
(don't ask me why; possibly it only seems that way because Netscape
eating the memory iss the most common situation on my box).

In these cases, at least sendmail, inetd and syslog will have problems
when forking - they'll get a sig11 right after the fork (I don't know
how 'right after' translates, sorry - timewise, it is just about at
once).

I've not explicitly tried to reproduce this bug and track down this,
as it means a lot of hassle to me when it occurs, and I've got enough
trouble as it is (sorry).  It seems to be reproducable - it happens
"pretty often".

My machine is a PPro-based box - I don't know if this matter.  I seem
to remember it also happening after I upgraded to 80MB; I know it
happened when I had 64MB, at least.

I can try to reproduce it if somebody that know more about the VM
system than me has some clues as to what I should do to track it down
- in that case, I'd like to get the clues by tomorrow (so I can spend
tomorrow attempt to find it; I most likely don't have time between
then and the release).

Eivind.

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