On Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:38:20 +0000, Duncan wrote: > Jim Henderson posted on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:54:04 +0000 as excerpted: > >> Come to think, there is a third oddity that I just realized was new - >> occasionally when hitting groups on forums.opensuse.org, a group's >> headers will completely redownload, and old messages (that haven't >> expired) will show up as unread. > > That one's almost always a server oddity -- due to xref: renumbering. > However, in your case, given the other issues, it sounds like you may > have more complex problems.
I think in this case it's not a server issue; the server is the same server (and I've actually administered the server in the past) - the group didn't do that with the old name/address, just the new one. But it's the same physical hardware. > You don't happen to have ECC backed memory, do you? If for some reason > your memory (or for that matter, your disk, or maybe the bus connecting > the disk to the machine) is going bad, you may be getting bit-flips that > are turning one thing into something entirely different. ECC backed > memory is designed to try to detect and correct such issues with memory, > and there are disk based solutions as well, but neither one is > particularly common yet, and ecc memory is much more expensive as it > requires additional chips on the memory modules (and because they /are/ > more expensive, they're not as common, which makes them even /more/ > expensive, ecc memory is thus normally considered a server option and > rarely available in desktops/laptops). Yeah, I don't have ECC memory, but if I was having memory problems, I'd expect other weirdness in the system as well. The behaviour of pan is the only odd thing I'm seeing, and just since I switched that server setting. > I'd try something like memtest. Just because it says you're clean > doesn't necessarily mean you are (it doesn't stress the memory bus, just > the cells, so if it's memory that's barely within tolerance at the rated > clockspeed, it may not show up, I had that problem with some memory at > one point), but if it says your memory is dodgy, better replace it > before you start having worse issues. > > And check the cable seating to your drives, etc, as well. > > Whatever's happening, it does seem strange, that's for sure! FWIW, one > of the best indicators I had a problem with my memory (the memory > clocking issue mentioned above, it went away when I declocked the memory > a notch) was that bzip2 would often complain trying to decompress > something, as it's well checksummed. Big compiles would often error out > as well, but big compiles aren't so common on binary distributions. But > try bzip2-ing a bunch of files, then bunzip2ing them, and see if bunzip2 > complains about any of them. If it does, you're a sure candidate for > physical system issues, memory, disk, otherwise, but somewhere! I'd normally agree, but the system is pretty heavily used - video encoding going on in the background at the moment, lots of compression/ decompression going on, and encrypted filesystems in use. A fair amount of things that would reflect a problem quickly if it were hardware- related. On the weird cached articles issue, I just duped it and the cache files are messed up. I grepped the text and found both cache files. Hadn't noticed before, but the message text that *should* be there is appended to the end of the correct file. Threading looks like a likely culprit - I'll reduce the number of concurrent tasks across all servers to 1 each and see if that helps. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
