Xref: utzoo unix-pc.general:4112 comp.sys.att:8018 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att Subject: Re: Where or where has my memory gone? (UNIX pc) Summary: related to disappearing clist buffers? Message-ID: <1832@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 12 Nov 89 14:36:21 GMT References: <577@limbic.UUCP> <4930@druco.ATT.COM> Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 56 I have 2 meg on the motherboard and a 67 meg drive on my 3b1. According to sysinfo, the smallest I've seen the free store drop is 497K; even when I've tried to excessively load the machine. I'm not sure if the machine is sensing a low water mark at 512K and starting to page to disk at that point or what. Heaven only knows what algorithm the kernel is using. At work, we use a 7300 with a 40 meg disk with 1 meg on the motherboard and 1.5 on cards. We have three serial ports going. We use tty000 to drive a trailblazer and tty000 connected to a dz port on a vax 750. The 7300 is our news server since we've had a lot of problems with SILO overruns on the vax ports talking to the trailbalzer. I've noticed that about every two weeks the 7300 at work goes brain-dead with a normal console display and working mouse, but ignores any input via the keyboard or tty. It would seem that all the jobs in the ready queue, except for smgr, are hung becaue anything such as sysinfo does not update the display, but the time and date in W5 at the top of the screen keep updating. We're running HDB uucp. Unfortunately, since the machine is locked up it is rather difficult to tell what is going on. At home, I had a LOT of problems running version 3.51 and the stock uucp. My machine crashed at least once a day. After considerable consultation with ye olde hotline, AT&T replaced the motherboard after trying a recompiled uucico that they downloaded to my machine. Even with the new motherboard, I still had crashing. The HDB uucp solved the problems I was having. The crashes that I got at home were the same in symptom that we get on occasion at work. The difference is that at work we transfer about 4 megs in and 4 megs of data out of the 7300 every day. At home, my input is about 400 to 750K per day. We can live with the occasional crashes at work, since once every two weeks or so isn't that awful :-). I built a little box with a 6502 CPU chip that monitors the serial line going to the vax. If the monitor doesn't see a uucico from the 7300 at least once an hour, it picks a relay to reboot the 7300. What I have noticed on my machine is that big chunks of memory erode over the course of two or three days and then reappear. The free store is about 900K right after booting the mahcine, and this usually drops to aobut 625K over a couple of days, after which the memory seems to return from limbo. As someone mentioned a while ago, the clist buffers seem to slowly go away too. My machine starts out with about 130, and that drops to about 120 after a while, but seems to stabilize at 120. One last item. I've talked to people that had tons of problems with the 3.51 uucp such as myself, while other people have had no problmes at all. One person speculated that use of /dev/ph* for uucp was a factor in the crashing. Bill wtm@neoucom.edu