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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!olivea!uunet!psgrain!ee.und.ac.za!hippo.ru.ac.za!kudu!g89r4222 From: g89r4222@kudu.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet) Subject: Re: wd stops on update Message-ID: <g89r4222.737883034@kudu> Sender: news@hippo.ru.ac.za (Usenet News Admin) Organization: Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa References: <1tafgi$5s7@zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk> <cproto.737791950@marsh> Date: Thu, 20 May 1993 07:30:34 GMT Lines: 32 In <cproto.737791950@marsh> cproto@cs.curtin.edu.au (Computer Protocol) writes: >lessen@axion.bt.co.uk (Lee Essen) writes: >>This is a bit of a strange problem! At completely random times, luckily with >>a large MTBF, my wd light comes on and stays on and no more disk access is >>permitted, the processes just block! >>It appears that the problem occurs when 'update' sync's the drive, when I >>reboot the filesystems are always clean (thank god!) >I have the same problem. It seems related to a high rate of context >switches e.g. running a large make in one xterm and doing some work >in another xterm often causes the system to lock up as you describe >it. I.e. processes not using the harddrive work fine (ping, X11, etc) >but anything going near the disk just locks up. The system I'm using used to do what you describe as well - if the load went much higher than about 1.2, and there was a lot of disk access, then the system would hang as described. Patchkits 0.2.2 and especially 0.2.3 seem to have fixed this problem. Installing 16M of RAM also seems to have made a big difference. A couple of nights ago we tried 4 concurrent makes (gcc 2.3.3, 386bsdkernel, a Linda system and something else), and apart from system load going up, the box survived without any ill effects. Geoff. -- ============================csgr@alpha.ru.ac.za=============================== Geoff Rehmet, Parallel Processing Group, |#define DISCLAIMER These are my Computer Science Department, | ramblings, not the Rhodes University, RSA. | University's