From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Oleg Drokin Subject: Re: link/unlink problem gone? Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 09:19:33 +0300 Message-ID: <20030207091933.A6256@namesys.com> References: <20030129164906.A8320@namesys.com> <20030129164906.A8320@namesys.com> <20030131105745.A7426@namesys.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Zygo Blaxell Cc: reiserfs-list@namesys.com Hello! On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 05:32:10PM -0500, Zygo Blaxell wrote: > > Sigh, these were false hopes indeed. > > I can reproduce it with 2.4.21-pre4, only it is now harder for some reason. > I've seen times-to-failure ranging from 20 minutes to 20+ hours (!). Same here. > > Chris: My current idea is it happens during low memory conditions, so I am > > actively running around prune_icache and id's dcache equivalent. Probably > > you can easily reproduce that if you'd have no swap and not very much RAM. > > > > (Ok, I just checked, limited the RAM to 90M and turned off SWAP entirely. > > and reproduced the problem fairly quickly) > I have observed the problem on machines ranging in size from 96 to > 512MB RAM. I haven't observed a correlation between swapping activity > and failures but I haven't been looking for this either. The machines I noticed that with newer 2.4.21-pre kernels first I see processes die because of OOM and only after that I see direntries pointing to nowhere. I reproduced this much more than once, so I believe there is some correlation between these. > that have problems machines are swapping at some time or another (they > have several hundred MB of swap used). And they are just swapping all the time, so it may take a while before useful code runs and problem happens, it seems. So far I decided that with SWAP turned off one can reproduce problem more easily that with SWAP on (especially if swap is large). Bye, Oleg