On 10/17/23 05:07, David Higgs wrote:
I have an underpowered amd64 VPS and attempted to (auto)upgrade it to 7.4.
Everything went swimmingly until it attempted to relink the kernel, at
which point it (seemingly) hung.
With previous releases, I would expect the host to become unresponsive for
a few minutes, and eventually recover. I chalked the issue up to
insufficient RAM and hitting swap - however, my upgrade has been in this
state for more than 6 hours.
I plan to consult the manual upgrade guide to hopefully figure out a way to
successfully finish the install, and then disable relinking while I find a
solution.
Does anyone have tips for this situation, aside from throwing more hardware
at it?
Thanks!
—david
I had some issues with a VPS for a while -- absolutely horrific disk
performance. Upgrades that used to take ten minutes (and yes, THAT was
really bad) started taking well over an hour (I gave up, stopped it, and
did it manually by unpacking tar files, coping kernel, etc., so I have no
idea what the actual time was going to be if I had let it complete). I
contacted tech support at the VPS, and they came back with, "oh yeah, you
are on some really old hardware. Please set up a new instance and migrate
to that, that should solve your problem", but since the machine was doing
its usual job just fine (low volume mail and webserver), I was slow to
actually do this. Finally, they sent me notice they were decommissioning
the old hw I was on, and I HAD to move by x/x/xxxx, and thus, I did, and
things are much better. And it turned out, cheaper.
However, I did find it interesting that my poor disk performance was even
worse when doing the upgrade.
Moral: might be worth talking to your VPS provider. You might be on old
hw, too.
A number of releases ago, but after KARL and library relinks1, I found
that on i386, 384MB was required to prevent swapping during the kernel and
library relink at boot. I'm assuming it is "worse" now, and worse yet on
amd64.
Nick.
