RE: [cobalt-users] RaQ4 low on memory

[James Riordon <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 3:13 PM +0100 8/28/01, Graeme Fowler wrote:

> Whoa, not good at all... your server got so memory-starved just prior to the
> first of these messages that it hit a problem in the kernel's virtual memory
> handler code. Looks like that killed (or at the very least zombied) kswapd,
> which now means it's unlikely you're using any swap memory.

Can this be properly recovered with a reboot? Is there any long term 
damage from this. I presume not.


> The way to recover? A reboot, I'm sad to say. Boom goes your uptime ;-)

Fortunately we are small enough that no one will probably notice at this point.

> After that you'll need to spend some time making sure billions of things
> don't happen at once. And it might be worth looking through your webserver
> access logs and maillogs to see what else was happening at the time, too.

I have checked all the logs (maillog, cron, xferlog, etc.... all of 
them). And have only found the one inconsistency from the secure log 
that I emailed to the list. I have also checked the cron jobs and 
everything seems normal there too!

The only thing I changed on the machine in the last two weeks was 
yesterday afternoon I added 3 .procmailrc files to three different 
users home directories. Could this possibly be the culprit? I can 
find no evidence of this killing anything. It does raise a warning in 
logcheck but that is only a warning (Suspicious rcfile 
"/home/sites/site27/users/username/.procmailrc")

As per "Per M Knutsen", I fail to see how 'top' will help me now. Top 
as far as I know makes no logs of events such as this. I verified top 
first thing to be sure things were back to normal, and they were back 
to normal, as my first email stated. Thanks all the same. (Correct me 
if i am wrong here).

I will perform a reboot and see if this happens again. Then I will be 
worried. So, other suggestions are welcome for sure, as I carefully 
inspect the services on my server too!

--
James Riordon
SysAdmin
http://www.amigo-3.com