Re: [Summary-Talk] Regular kernel panic in Mac OS 10.2

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/26/04 8:40 PM John Burwell (john.burwell.lists@galvnews.com) wrote:

>It'll run for about six days before it crashes with a kernel 
>panic.

*All* OS X kernel panics indicate either a hardware problem, or a bug in 
OS X, or a bug in a third party hardware driver. It is not possible for 
Summary to cause a kernel panic without one of those three things being 
the true cause.

The most common cause of kernel panics is marginal RAM. The RAM might 
test out fine, but be just the slightest bit off, so that it fails once 
every few days. By far the best way to test for hardware problems is to 
run Summary on a completely different machine and see if you have 
problems there. It is also possible to try removing one RAM stick at a 
time and see if the machine continues to fail.

There is also a known problem in OS X involving vnodes, see for example 
<http://summary.net/talk/200310/msg00023.html> and 
<http://summary.net/talk/200310/msg00025.html>. Since those messages it 
has developed that some machines appear to be out of vnodes but are in 
fact fine, while others are indeed running out. Significantly, vnode 
problems tend to take several days to develop and become rarer as memory 
is increased, just as you describe. Dramatically raising the number of 
available vnodes is worth a try.

There are also at least two other kernel bug in OS X that are not as well 
characterized as the vnode problem, though they don't tend to show up 
with configurations as simple as yours.

>I want to do all I can to keep Summary happy on this machine, but I 
>want to evaluate all my options. I'd have thought this would be well 
>within Summary's capacity to handle, but as the frequency of the 
>crashing seemed to increase with the size of our logs, I'm beginning to 
>wonder if we're overloading it. I've also put in as much RAM as we can, 
>and Summary's not even using it all.

Some of our users run vastly more complex Summary configurations without 
any problems. You are not even beginning to push Summary's limits. As the 
log files get larger Summary tends to make more system calls and use more 
RAM, which increases the chance of running into a kernel bug or having 
bad RAM crash the machine.

If it is possible for you to switch to OS 9, I highly recommend it. OS 9 
has proven to be dramatically more reliable than OS X for running 
Summary. If you can't do that, perhaps the simplest solution would be to 
reboot the machine two or three times a week.

Jason

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Jason@Summary.Net
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