On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 02:37:02PM +0100, Frank van der Linden wrote:

> I hate to say it, but these are the symptoms of either faulty memory
> or a faulty cache. Nothing happens when you're not running any
> processes, because the memory isn't used much then.

I thought I had some bad RAM, but it seems very likely that softdep caused
the symptoms I was seeing.

For example: I though my 128 meg PC100 stick was bad, so I took it out and
popped in two 32 meg sticks from work. Everything ran fine, confirming the
bad RAM. Then, recently, I bought another 128 meg stick, and the machine
started blowing up again. It seems a bit like having too much memory makes
softdep go insane. With 64 megs of RAM, I was stable. With 128, I was
extremely unstable.

Incidentally, after noting this and noting that turning off softdep gave
me the rock-solid stability I wanted, I popped the first "bad" 128 meg
stick back in and haven't had so much as the hint of a glitch. It was
an expensive discovery, but I guess I can't throw my heart into complaining
about having too much RAM. I'm still trying to figure out ways to not waste
all of it. mfs disks are a start.

This all goes out the window if the guy who started the thread isn't running
softdep, of course. Adam?

-- 
   Mason Loring Bliss   mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us             E w i g e
awake ? sleep : dream;  http://acheron.ne.mediaone.net  Meerschweinchenkraft