When I run top, it shows the 2GB ram almost fully allocated and no swap used; this is fairly typical in all situations in my experience. I have experienced heavy paging before and this isn't it - this is a total freeze.
I have some more data points, for what its worth. The problem happens as reliably with scp as it does with ftp (which at the very least means this report is under the wrong package). I don't have the problem doing a cp to an AFS filesystem. I have a second Debian Lenny client with all the same software installed (newer hardware) and it doesn't have trouble ftping the large file out. It seems possible this is a hardware problem, but I don't know how to diagnose it. Liam On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Liam Healy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> If the file is large enough (> 1 GB or so), an ftp put will reliably >> crash Linux. At some point during the transfer (about 1 to 3GB), the >> screen will freeze with no response from keyboard, mouse, or updates on >> running programs; also unresponsive on the network to pings or ssh. >> Reboot is the only option. After reboot, there is nothing in any logs >> that I can find to indicate what happened. > > The only thing that I can think of that might cause that sort of symptoms > is running out of system memory and going heavily into swap (in which case > the system would recover eventually when the out-of-memory handler started > killing processes). If you watch memory usage in top while this is > happening, does that back up this guess? > > (In general, if a userspace program can crash the system, that's a bug in > the kernel, no matter what the program is doing, but memory allocation > problems can cause the system to be extremely slow for an extended period > of time until the kernel sorts out what to kill, particularly depending on > your swap setup.) > > -- > Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
