[13175] in Athena Bugs
Re: rsaix [7.7F]: AIX
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (hartmans@MIT.EDU)
Fri Feb 3 12:58:38 1995
From: hartmans@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 1995 12:58:26 -0500
To: yandros@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc:
The ASCII Netprob interface is broken so I can't quote your
original message.
My understanding of the problem is that you were pasting some
lines of code into your xterm and your entire session mostly went
away. What I suspect happened is the system ran out of swap space and
started killing random processes to recover more space. This was
probably caused by a bug in the X server, if anything.
Two things should make this bug less likely to appear after
3.2.5 goes public. First, the swapspace has been increased.
Secondly, the X server has been updated, hopefully with a version with
significantly fewer memory problems.
Pickled-herring is currently running an image that is somewhat
behind our current test image. For Richard, the X server grew to 130
Mb after 9 hours of usage. In a day or so, I'll update
Pickled-herring to the current test version; after that time, would
you be willing to test to see if any cascade failures can be produced.
I realize that your original report is probably not easily repeated.
As far as the multi-tasking problems, they should be somewhat
better on Pickled-herring now. I suspect that AIX's memory usage
patterns will prevent the machine from performing incredibly well with
too many things running at once, but the performance should now be
tollerable and consistent.
Finally, we don't have a fix for the failure mode whre the
screen goes black and resets 30 seconds later after the X server is
killed. The kernel notices the X server is not responding to a
request to take control of or give up the graphics hardware. It waits
30 seconds and then sends a SIGKILL to the process. Hopefully, the X
server will behave well enough that this problem is not repeatable in
the future.
--Sam
