Bug 18507

Summary:	System 'dies' On High Load!!??
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	president <president>
Component:	misc	Assignee:	freebsd-bugs (Nobody) <bugs>
Status:	Closed FIXED
Severity:	Affects Only Me
Priority:	Normal
Version:	4.0-RELEASE
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description president 2000-05-12 00:00:01 UTC

The system will stop responding during high loads (peak hours of the day with a busy website (2M+ pageviews/day))... The server should be able to handle it, considering its a Dell PowerEdge 4400 w/1GB RAM + 2x36GB Ultra3 SCSI HDs + Dual Intel EtherExpress PRO 100/B Network Cards... If I turn off apache (doesn't do me much good), the server is 100% fine, but if I turn on, it is dead in under 1 minute (this is a regular apache install, nothing special (./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache)...)...

any ideas? (i tried apache 1.3.9 and 1.3.12, neither helped... hmm)


also, ram doesn't seem to 'unallocate?'... hmm... it just calls it inactive... but doesn't call it "free"... hmm... does that mean anything to you guys? (this is an output from the top of top after apache being off for about 15 minutes)



last pid: 62292;  load averages:  0.00,  0.00,  0.00    up 2+06:34:30  20:47:01
32 processes:  1 running, 31 sleeping
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
Mem: 46M Active, 822M Inact, 96M Wired, 30M Cache, 55M Buf, 14M Free

How-To-Repeat: just get a busy website and turn on apache... and can't even ping server... after a few mins of this 'seemingly dead server' timing out ping requests, it comes back (about 7 mins)... and then i can quickly ssh in and 'killall -9 httpd', because if i don't, it dies again... hmm...

Comment 1 Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai 2000-05-13 12:53:02 UTC

-On [20000512 04:00], president@thecoolhost.com (president@thecoolhost.com) wrote:
>
>also, ram doesn't seem to 'unallocate?'... hmm... it just calls it
>inactive... but doesn't call it "free"... hmm... does that mean
>anything to you guys? (this is an output from the top of top after
>apache being off for about 15 minutes)

Please read the manpage for top(1).

It would have explained you that this is the amount of memory allocated
to (In)active pages.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok vd Werven/Asmodai    asmodai@[wxs.nl|bart.nl|freebsd.org]
Documentation nutter/C-rated Coder BSD: Technical excellence at its best  
The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project <http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai>
Atone me to my throes curtail...

Comment 2 president 2000-05-13 18:56:36 UTC

I think I may have stumbled on the problem/solution... Must increase the
MAXUSERS value in the kernel configuration... :)

Comment 3 nbm freebsd_committer

2000-06-26 11:38:18 UTC

State Changed
From-To: open->closed

originator solved the problem.