Re: 4.9 SMP Stability?

From: Morten A. Middelthon (morten_at_freenix.no)
Date: 04/16/04

  • Next message: Roman Kurakin: "4.10 Beta" 
    Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:25:06 +0200
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org

    Hi,

    I have been following this thread since I've been experiencing similar
    problems with my dual P4 2.8GHz Xeon Dell PowerEdge 1750 server. Hopefully
    my experiences will be useful to some of you.

    I started with installing FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, then cvsup'ing and upgrading to
    -p4 without problems. When I upgraded I also compiled in SMP-support into the
    kernel. Then my problems started. The machine would panic and then reboot at
    seemingly random intervals. After reading what some of the others on this list
    did I first tried upgrading to 4.10-BETA, but that didn't help. I then
    downgraded to 4.8-RELEASE-pXX (iirc), but no help there either (fortunately a
    buildworld only takes about 20 minutes on this box ;)).
    The next thing was to check BIOS and firmware versions, but they were all up
    to date.

    Then I got a tip from a friend on IRC who told me to check my KVM settings in my
    kernel. Out of old habit I have always defined NMBCLUSTERS, NSFBUFS and
    similar options to specific values, overriding FreeBSD's own dynamic settings,
    which are based on the amount of RAM. The machine in question has 2GB of RAM,
    which is the highest amount of RAM in any FreeBSD server I've ever set up, so
    the values for NMBCLUSTERS and so on I've used for servers with lower amounts
    of RAM obviously didn't work for this setup.

    Now I let FreeBSD do this for me, that is setting maxusers to 0 and then
    _not_ defining NMBCLUSTERS, NSFBUFS etc. So far the machine has been
    completely stable. I've done one 'make -j4 buildworld', built several ports
    and moved a large filesystem to it over NFS, and no problems.

    with regards, 

    -- 
Morten A. Middelthon
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)

    • application/pgp-signature attachment: stored
  • Next message: Roman Kurakin: "4.10 Beta"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: What is the maximum number of minutes for Session timeout?
      ... amount would run your server to the ground after a few hours. ... Holding session values in RAM for 24 hours, ... >>> ASP.NET MVP ...
      (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet)
    • Re: Anyone turned their pagefile off on XP?
      ... Its basically a file and print server. ... I don't think the /3GB switch is of any benefit for such a server. ... to enable it on a system with only a small amount of RAM. ...
      (uk.comp.homebuilt)
    • Re: Hardware requirements for Hyper-v
      ... take at least the recommended RAM and then count the amount of VM's you will run. ... "Meinolf Weber" wrote: ... I need a simple learning sytstem that allows me to learn Server ...
      (microsoft.public.windows.server.setup)
    • Re: HOW TO give OS more than 4gb RAM?!
      ... If you are using Windows Server 2003 Standard then there is a cap for amount of RAM supported: ...
      (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
    • Slow Performance (Win 2003 Std Server)
      ... I'm currently experiencing the same issues with 2003 SBS. ... I'm running a HP server 2.4ghz P4 with 512mb ram. ...
      (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)