Greetings, We have been running FreeBSD on our mail servers for about as long as I can remember. Recently, we decided to go SMP to handle increased mail load. After assembling the hardware, installing the OS and software, and restoring all of our data, we noticed in testing that our first machine began hanging semi-regularly when it began processing lots of mail. Disabling SMP eliminated the hangs completely. We tried it all again on completely different hardware with exactly the same result. Our conclusion: somethings's buggy in SMP.
Here are the symptoms. The machine hangs, and becomes completely unresponsive. It looks like a deadlock. It will sometimes respond to the power button and shut down (without being able to first sync and unmount filesystems), and sometimes the power button event gets caught in the deadlock. Sinceit's not actually a crash, there is no core dump or other debugging information. In the most recent situation, it hung at different points every time I tried to compile ezm3, after successfully compiling other packages. We're system administrators, not kernel hackers, so this is a plea for help. I wouldn't know where to start, but I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. We're also willing to give a (trustworthy) FreeBSD developer root access to the test machine since it's just sitting idle right now. If you need to crash it, that's fine. We'll have people during normal business hours who know how to push a reset button. Thanks for your time. -- Charles Ulrich Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-smp To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
