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

[Matt Juszczak]

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.

-Matt