sourceware+egcs strangeness today

sourceware+egcs strangeness today

[Jason Molenda]

Some people may have noticed that sourceware+egcs was acting weird today.

The anoncvs load went through the roof today.  Jeff Law's EGCS snapshots
script ran for about eight hours before he gave up waiting for it.
We had also ran out of file descriptor table entries in the kernel again,
so the snapshot was getting hosed (as well as other people's processes).

He shut down anoncvs, which removed just about all of the pressure on
the system, and did made the snapshot, reenabling anoncvs after that.

If you tried to do a Kerberized CVS operation around noon PST today, you
may have gotten an error message.  Kerberized CVS (and SSH authenticated
CVS) were still operational, but your cvs client was trying to connect
to the pserver port; adding a line like

cvs             1999/tcp                        # krb4 CVS server   

to your /etc/services would have made it work.

Anyway, all was normal and happy after this... until ChrisF asked me
why mail wasn't going at around 5pm.  Yes, the mail transfer programs
all died and mail service has been turned off for about seven hours now.

I've restarted mail service now, you can expect to see a huge influx
of traffic on all your sourceware mailing lists.  I'm sorry we didn't
catch this earlier.


As I've said in the past, we've got a proposal out for a new
sourceware+egcs system.  It should have gone before exec staff by now,
I haven't heard back on whether it has been approved or not.  In the
near term, Jeff or me will try to find where this stupid file descriptor
table define is in the Linux 2.0 kernel and make it a lot bigger.  We're
also going to pick up another 128MB of memory for the system next week
(total cost ~$100; we can just put it on a normal travel expense report.
Bawahaha.)  

These tiny measures should help to put off the inevitable complete
collapse of the current sourceware+egcs system for a few more weeks. :-)


Jason // Sourceware Czar
         Free the Software!

Re: sourceware+egcs strangeness today

[Chris Faylor]

On Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 05:16:08PM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>In the near term, Jeff or me will try to find where this stupid file
>descriptor table define is in the Linux 2.0 kernel and make it a lot
>bigger.

Check out:

http://www.linux.org.za/filehandle.patch.linux/filehandle.patch.linux.v8.04

It has a patch for linux 2.0.36 that makes the number of open files and open
inodes configurable.

-chris

Re: sourceware+egcs strangeness today

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 17:16:08 -0700
   From: Jason Molenda <jsm@cygnus.com>

   In the
   near term, Jeff or me will try to find where this stupid file descriptor
   table define is in the Linux 2.0 kernel and make it a lot bigger.

You just have to write a number to /proc/sys/kernel/file-max.  If you
cat that file, you'll see the current number.  Piece of pie.  Don't
forget to increase the number of I-nodes while you're at it
(/proc/sys/kernel/inode-max).

I quote /usr/doc/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO:

  7.14.  Increasing limits

  The following few example commands may be helpful to those wondering
  how to increase certain soft limits imposed by the kernel:

  echo 4096 > /proc/sys/kernel/file-max
  echo 12288 > /proc/sys/kernel/inode-max
  echo 300 400 500 > /proc/sys/vm/freepages



   From: Chris Faylor <cgf@cygnus.com>
   Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 22:08:32 -0400

   On Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 05:16:08PM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
   >In the near term, Jeff or me will try to find where this stupid file
   >descriptor table define is in the Linux 2.0 kernel and make it a lot
   >bigger.

   Check out:

   http://www.linux.org.za/filehandle.patch.linux/filehandle.patch.linux.v8.04

   It has a patch for linux 2.0.36 that makes the number of open files and open
   inodes configurable.

That patch permits you to configure the number of open files and
inodes which may exist in a single process.

I think that what sourceware needs is to configure the number of files
and i-nodes open on the entire system.  I don't think any single
process needs to open more than the default limit of 256 file
descriptors.  The limit on files open in the entire system is already
configurable.

Ian