Ian Spray wrote:
> The network I/O is poor, and I've spent ages messing with the different PIO
> and DMA modes in custom kernels and have only managed to slow the system
> down compared to the conf/DEFAULT settings.  I haven't messed with the
> nmbclusters option (mentioned in the archive) but I am wondering if my
> setting the kern.maxvnodes to 40000 has anything to do with the crashes.
> The vnodes are exhausted within a few hours, but in doing so have I taken
> the value too high ?  No idea.

Well, I've seen the crashes on my qube2 with both vnodes and
nmbclusters tweaked and untweaked (I only started tweaking them
recently), so frankly I doubt it has anything to do with that.
I suspect the nic driver has issues.  My qube2 had been up for 8 days
when I noticed a ton of messages in the syslog about needing to
increase nmbclusters (which I thought was a tad peculiar as I'd never
seen these before and I'd been running 1.6.1 since its release).  I
ran netstat -p tcp -I tlp0, and the statistic that caught my eye was:

        305480144184567120 send attempts resulted in self-quench

I've since rebuilt with a bumped nmbclusters, and haven't had a repeat
performance... but I've also stopped attempting to get rdiff-backup to
work which was what I was doing around the time all those nmbclusters
messages appeared in my syslog.  (I've given up on rdiff-backup on the
qube2, it builds, but it segfaults routinely when being run, even in
local-only mode.)  I continue to rsync ~8G of data every night (change
sets are fairly small) between an x86 box running Linux and the qube2,
which works fine and should be pretty much equivelant to what
rdiff-backup was doing network-wise, so why it spawned that storm of
nmbcluster warnings I can't fathom.  But thats not to say my qube2 is
stable now.  It still just locks up every once and while.  Anyway, if
you catch anything interesting in debug mode let us know, and I'll
rebuild with debugging enabled and maybe we can compare notes.

-- 
Jamie Heilman                     http://audible.transient.net/~jamie/
"I was in love once -- a Sinclair ZX-81.  People said, "No, Holly,
 she's not for you." She was cheap, she was stupid and she wouldn't
 load -- well, not for me, anyway."                     -Holly