[nycbug-talk] Box randomly locks up, dmesg full of swapzone warnings?

[Pete Wright]

On 2-Apr-09, at 4:03 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> Around 5:30 today, one of my FreeBSD boxes randomly locked up and just
> stopped responding to everything: web, ssh, etc..  I haven't been  
> able to
> find the source of the problem yet.  After a hard reboot, I started
> parsing some logs, and came across this:
>
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase
> kern.maxswzoneswap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel:
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase  
> kern.maxswzone
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto last message repeated 39 times
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase
> kern.maxswzoneswap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel:
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase  
> kern.maxswzone
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto last message repeated 81 times
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase
> kern.maxswzoneswap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone
> Apr  2 17:34:25 pluto kernel:
>
>
> If you notice.  They all occured in the same SECOND.  With the repeat
> notices, that's over 100 of the same message in a period of a second.
> Does this mean the box was swapping and at that speciifc point, swap  
> was
> full?
>
> No idea what could cause the box to swap - it runs web and mail.  I'm
> currently looking through some logs (web is next) to see what could  
> have
> possibly happened.
>

hey matt - i remember something similar to this happening to me at one  
point when i got spam'd with some rather large attachments.   
spamassasin ended up eating up a ton of RAM and caused the system to  
start paging out to disk.

not sure if this is your case, but maybe it'll help trouble shoot your  
problem....

-p