On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 09:55:34AM +0100, Paul Robinson wrote:
> I'll hold my hands up on this one - I was the person on the exim mailing list 
> that stated this. OK, the reason I said this, was purely out of experience 
> with OpenBSD and older Linux kernels. FreeBSD doesn't appear to do this 
> (however I hammer my FBSD boxes, so they would never get the chance), and 
> I've never actually used NetBSD (somebody cc'ed me in, and yes, I promise 
> I'll try it soon, it's the only *BSD I haven't used yet, etc.) so was meant 
> as a sweeping generalisation when comparing OpenBSD to Linux.
> 
> In the past what I've seen is service machines in a cluster running OpenBSD 
> (back then I think it 2.4) fronted with load balancing hardware. The machines 
> would typically be running say Zeus, or a custom ftpd as a daemon and that 
> would be about all the traffic going through that machine. If you tried using 
> any service that used inetd, you would often find it would take a good 45-60 
> seconds for say telnetd to wake up. When we investigated, we found that if 
> you didn't use an inetd service for about a week (common in this 
> environment), inetd would just get swapped out to free up memory for Zeus or 
> qpopper, or Exim, or whatever.

The reason is probably that, for some reason, the free RAM became low and
the system had to free some pages. As inetd was idle, its pages were elected
to be paged out.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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