From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: I'm using kernel-2.4.3-12smp. The server is based on qmail, which means a lot of small processes - qmail- smtpd, qmail-pop3d, etc - are forked and finished in miliseconds. After 1-2 days, one of the CPUs is 100% in use by the system ( it can be seen using 'top') and the network starts to fail ( pinging my machine I see some packets being lost ). I see the following messages when the system starts to slows down: mm: critical shortage of bounce buffers net: 23 messages suppressed ... After this I have to reboot the machine. I have other machines with the same configuration and even more load running kernel-2.2.19 ( red hat 6.2 based ) with no problems and uptimes > 100 days. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. qmail loaded server. 2. start thousands of small processes during hours Actual Results: I see the following messages when the system starts to slows down: mm: critical shortage of bounce buffers net: 23 messages suppressed ... After this I have to reboot the machine. Expected Results: The machine shouldn't have to be rebooted. Additional info: Modules loaded: Module Size Used by eepro100 16144 1 (autoclean) ipchains 32000 0 (unused) usb-uhci 21392 0 (unused) usbcore 50560 1 [usb-uhci] raid1 13408 2 aic7xxx 113840 6 sd_mod 11040 6 scsi_mod 88864 2 [aic7xxx sd_mod]
I also tried with the latest raw hide kernel - 2.4.6-3.1smp, but with this one I have a kernel panic after a couple of hours.
I have the same error using the 2.4.3-12enterprise kernel on a Dell PowerEdge 6400 with the megaraid driver for the RAID controller. It has 2GB of RAM. This occurrs under any heavy load and effectively kills the server. This is a newly "upgraded" server (formatted RH 6.2 and put on a new install of 7.1). This occurs when I issue an rsync command to get the data from it's partner in a failover cluster rsync -ave ssh --exclude="/.../" 192.168.1.1::home/ /home/ It then begins transferring 93GB on the rsync, but it is so drained as to be unusable during this time. The "tigger" message as it has been nicknamed than begins to come up on the console. (Glad I don't do this often...) Simply killing the rsync process removes the errors and the performance is back to normal. This did not occur in the 2.2.19 kernel used previous to the 7.1 install. Research gives this discussion: http://lwn.net/2001/0607/kernel.php3 but the success of this patch is not later discussed.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/