/dev/dsp "device busy" - one possible solution
I was playing around with kde 3.2 and a crashing artsd was locking up my sound system - any further attempts to use sound from gnome or xmms or anything failed with /dev/dsp - device busy messages. fstat and lsof showed nothing holding the device. A reboot would fix it, but why reboot FreeBSD? I then remembered from a while ago that if I did the following... # cat /dev/dsp and then of course cntl-C to stop the output the device was no longer busy! I don't know why, but on my hardware at least (Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) this will 'unfreeze' the dsp output device. I'm just sending to the group as I searched for a while before I remembered my fix, and found no answers. So, if you are having the same problem looking for an answer, give this a try and report on your success. Maybe we can get this in to the FAQ. - Mike H. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: Apache and shared memory
When people talk about optimizing mod_perl shared memory, they are not referring to System V type shared memory as seen by ipcs. They are talking about memory shared by virtue of a process fork - this is effectively read only memory. The net effect is that a process may appear to be 20 meg, but may only use 2 or 3 meg, say. It has been difficult to monitor 'unshared' memory use in FreeBSD as freebsd has traditionally reported via getrusage() as an 'integrated' unshared memory use which is more related to the old school process accounting than it is to the actual unshared memory use - this may have changed in -CURRENT or recent -STABLEs. Linux reports the unshared memory directly via gtop which is a lot more convenient. I wish (hint hint) that there was a sysctl to handle this... There are other tricks you can do to maximize memory use, such as putting the php and perl servers, and image servers on separate apache processes, and proxying between them, rather than running php and mod_perl on the same server, and adjusting the (Min/Max)SpareServers to reap apache process during quieter times. The main thing to do with mod_perl is to pre-load all of the perl modules during apache startup so that the modules are shared rather than being loaded separately into each apache process. http://perl.apache.org has some excellent documentation about this. Also Apache::SizeLimit can be useful for mod_perl based systems. Tuning apache can be a lot of... fun! Hope this helps, - Mike H. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Monitoring disk activity?
I have disk access on my machine every 2 seconds, is there a way to figure out which process is the guilty one? Also, I have another drive which I let spin down - it spins up occasionally, I don't know why. I would like to figure out what program(s) are accessing the other disk. This is on 4-STABLE... I know I could write a kqueue program but that seems brutal. I have root on the machine, of course... Thanks for any help Mike H. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message