Re: Freezes on heavy disk I/O

Ion-Mihai Tetcu wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2004 18:59:50 +0300
> Panagiotis Astithas <past_at_noc.ntua.gr> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Konstantin 'Kosta' Welke wrote:
>>
>>>Hi!
>>>
>>>I've got a box running FreeBSD 5.2.1. Sometimes, it just
>>>freezes. Doesn't react to _any_thing except a hard reset.
>>>
>>>This is reproductable in some cases, all involving mainly
>>>disk I/O.
>>>
>>>1) When burning a CD (on another computer) from a samba share
>>>on the freebsd box, the box repliably freezes. This also
>>>happens when I'm encoding a DVD rip to avi on my windows box,
>>>while the DVD files are on the freebsd samba server.
>>>
>>>2) When doing stuff like portupgrade -a, it often (but always
>>>at different files/ports) freezes. This happens especially
>>>often when compiling gcc. (That's why I'm using the package now).
>>>
>>>3) Sometimes it just freezes like this, when playing an mp3,
>>>surfing the 'net, etc.
>>>
>>>I used memtest enabling all test for 9 hours finding no errors.
>>>Also, it's no overheating problem as it is not overclocked
>>>nor is there any hot air coming out of the CPU fan when those
>>>freezes occur.
>>>
>>>Any ideas?
>>
>>I have similar observations in my 5.2.1 machine. The recurring theme has 
>>always been that I was running under X and the freeze killed the 
>>console, although the machine responded to ping.
>>
>>When I tried the same action (a "portsdb -uU" or "portupgrade -a" in my 
>>case) from a virtual console I saw a panic. Since this never happens on 
>>my -current machine, I believe it is something already fixed in the tree.
> 
> 
> Actually I think it still happens; I've had the need for a few hard
> resets on my desktop with -current about 1 1/2 months; but it definitely
> happen less that about 6 months or about a year ago, so it seems we're
> on the right way :)

I forgot to mention that putting "clear_tmp_enable=YES" in rc.conf makes 
it even more rare. It could be on of the softupdates bugs on full 
filesystems that got fixed (or almost:-)).

Cheers,
-- 
Panagiotis Astithas
Electrical & Computer Engineer, PhD
Network Management Center
National Technical University of Athens, Greece