*BSD News Article 8787


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry
From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: Occasional system hangs
Message-ID: <1992Dec12.070038.2146@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
References: <ByysLH.Axr@ns1.nodak.edu> <1g95ueINNhri@manuel.anu.edu.au> <andrewh.724059111@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 07:00:38 GMT
Lines: 41

In article <andrewh.724059111@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au> andrewh@cs.monash.edu.au (Andrew Herbert) writes:
>My system, with 16 MB RAM and 32 MB swap, hangs in a similar way.  Existing
>processes such as INN processing incoming news and nntplinks sending outgoing
>news usually keep ticking away for quite some time (i.e. disk is unaffected),
>but it looks a whole lot like anything requiring a fork(), such as programs
>are run from the shell just hangs.  Eventually all processes grind to a halt,
>but the system can still be pinged.  The VM problem sounds quite a likely
>cause, alas.  gcc 2.3.1 is particularly good at bringing about this problem,
>while X8514 and friends rarely lasts more than 12 hours without hanging 386bsd
>and requiring a reboot.
>
>Time for more RAM I guess!

I have a box with 16M of RAM and the initial 5M swap that install likes to
give you.

	hecate 11 % uptime
	 1:03am  up 7 days, 13:31,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
	hecate 12 %

Of course nothing much is going on now, but I have been using it pretty
heavily lately.  The last reboot was intentional on my part to apply one
of the recently posted kernel patches (one of Julians, I think).

I can still crash it by "ping -f"'ing another computer for 30 minutes or
so, but I believe this is related more to my ethernet driver (I haven't
updated to the latest one of the AT&T STARLan cards yet) than any kernel
problems.  It's been highly stable for more than a month now.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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