Re: system hangs, out of memory ?

lilo (TaRDiS@mail.utexas.edu)
Fri, 31 May 1996 16:18:48 -0500 (CDT)


On Fri, 31 May 1996, Herbert Rosmanith wrote:

> I don't know if this behaviour has been changed, but sometimes, when
> you run out of swap, you will not get a error messages like "not enough
> virtual memory", but the system will silently hang.
> has this problem been touched with the recent 1.99.? kernels ?
>
> I'm using perl-mirror to mirror a site (> 1G) at night, and perl-mirror
> is definitely a memory hog. Yet I don't know what's causing the hang,
> but perl-mirror looks very suspicious to me.

Versions of mirror prior to 2.8 (or before?) running on perl4 have a major
memory leak due to a bug in that release of perl. I've seen this problem
before, big time. I ended up running my mirror script with the following
ulimit:

ulimit -d 8192

which limits the data segment of a process to 8MB in size. When mirror
exceeds 8MB of data storage in a long (or perhaps not so long) mirror run,
it will simply crash and your crontab entry to start the mirror can then
pick up where it left off in an hour or so.

But, that's the kludge. It would be far better to upgrade to mirror 2.8 and
run it with perl 5. To get the latest mirror, per the README file:

AVAILABILITY:
The latest version of mirror is available from:

src.doc.ic.ac.uk [146.169.2.1]
directory: computing/archiving/mirror
(shortcut packages/mirror)

ftp.th-darmstadt.de [130.83.55.75]
directory: pub/networking/mirror

ftp.sun.ac.za [146.232.213.2]
directory: pub/packages/mirror

archive.orst.edu [128.193.4.2]
directory: pub/mirrors/src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/archiving/mirror
(shortcut pub/packages/mirror)

Hope this helps! :)

:) lilo