Re: Qube2 slowly dies

[Florian Fainelli <florian@openwrt.org>]

Hi Glyn,

Le Wednesday 10 June 2009 16:04:03 Glyn Astill, vous avez écrit :
> Hi people,
>
> I've been directed here from the Debian lists by Martin Michlmayr. I'm
> running lenny on a qube2 128mb ram / 40gb disk.
>
> I've tried kernels 2.6.26 and 2.6.30~rc8 and the issue I'm about to
> describe is present in both, I haven't tried any other kernels - but I will
> try 2.6.22 when I can.
>
> Essentially the machine gets more and more sluggish until it finally dies.
> I've had a quick look in meminfo and I can't see that it's running out of
> memory, and I'm not sure what else to check?

Determine which process consumes all that memory. Can you describe which 
programs you are running on your Qube2 ?

>
> I find it hard to describe what's going off, but here's a scenario I hope
> illustrates the problem. The configure script is just an example of doing
> something - I could easily have extracted an archive with tar or something
> for the same results;
>
> - I start 2 ssh sessions and in one start configure for the postgres
> source, in the other I just started top.
>
> - And for a while all seems fine; configure ticks away and top refreshes
> every second.
>
> - Then top stops ticking over - but it'll refresh with a keypress. Anyway I
> exit top and try to run it again... nothing. I hit ctrl-c which brings me
> back to the prompt and I try again... nothing.
>
> - The configure script is still ticking over slowly.
>
> - I try "ps ax" - it works; so I try it again... nothing.
>
> - I try "ipcs" and "lsof" they both work and seem to keep working.
>
> - I try "ps ax" again... nothing. I hit ctrl-c and now it doesn't come back
> to the command prompt for a while.. say 5 minutes and eventually it's back.
>
> - It's still going. Some commands still work, some just do nothing.
> proc/meminfo shows it's not eaten all the memory.
>
> - If I try to start another ssh session I can log in, I get the motd, but I
> don't get to the shell.
>
> - Eventually the configure script ends, and all shells come back to the
> prompt. But it now seems totally braindamaged, I can run "ps ax" but "top"
> and other commands still do nothing. Heres strace attached to the top
> process:
>
> deb:~# strace -p 7228
> Process 7228 attached - interrupt to quit
> _newselect(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 500013}
>
> - Then after a little while the whole thing becomes unresponsive.
>
>
> Can anyone confirm they've seen the same behaviour or direct me what to
> look into?

I have been running linux-mips git builds for about a year and half now on my 
Qube2 without any troubles, the box serves as NFS/FTP server and works pretty 
well and sustains bandwidth.

My guess is that you are having a hardware problem or the box might not be 
cooled as it should be. If you want, you can test the following kernel which 
I have been running on this qube2 for some months: 
http://alphacore.org/~florian/linux-mips/qube/

Hope that helps.
-- 
Best regards, Florian Fainelli
Email : florian@openwrt.org
http://openwrt.org
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