Hi James,
On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I can show you a site that will crash ltsp + firefox with 256M ram on
client, reliably, repeatably, and at the same point every time.
Ooo...tell me more! I was actually going to post to the list about a
problem we've had which sounds almost identical to that one, and I've
traced it to the amount of RAM in the client.
Background info
---------------
We're running the latest & greatest LTSP v4.1.1 on an up-to-date Debian
"unstable" Dual Athlon MP w/2GB RAM system. Our clients are various name
brand and off-brand donated PCs, Pentium I and PII class. The clients are
running the stock 2.4 LTSP kernel. Our users use GNOME and the usual OSS
stars: OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, etc.
Problem description
-------------------
In the past few months (since upgrading to LTSP v4 with X.org I believe)
some of our clients would freeze up fairly often while people were
working, usually while surfing the web with Firefox. I could tell the
kernel hadn't crashed because I could ping the system, but we had to
reboot the client to get people logged back in (not cool when people are
in the middle something else). We could even reproduce the problem very
reliably by surfing to particular web pages. Here is one example page:
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~collegestore/baby-merchandise.html
This week I finally got the SSH server operating on the clients, so I was
able to login and see what was going on. Turns out the X server process
was just gone. Nothing in the X log. The CPU wasn't churning.
The problem didn't happen on all of our terminals though. At first I
thought that maybe it was connected to the video chip in use, which would
determine the X driver which might be buggy. Then I realized that the
terminals that could be consistently crashed all had 64MB of RAM. When I
bumped them up to 128MB of RAM then the consistent crashing stopped. Woo
Hoo! Now it seems that the crashing isn't totally gone, but adding RAM
*really* helped.
So Jim, does that sound like the same problem you've seen? Does at least
256MB of RAM per client seem to make it go away? I'm also thinking of
turning on NFS swap, at least as a stopgap measure. Anyone else have any
experience with this problem and possible solutions? Any help would be
greatly appreciated!
Jason
--
Jason Maas
DiscipleMakers Systems Dept -- www.dm.org
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