Sat Dec 19 15:36:32 PST 1998 — Between about 1:50pm and 2:11pm, one of our web servers (‘Storm,’ www.sonic.net) stopped serving web pages. Investigation reveals an almost certain explanation: a CGI program caused the system to become ‘swap-bound’ (that is, doing a lot of work using disk-based virtual memory).
Our web servers run CGI’s within specific resource limits; but as it turns out, one resource limit remained unset on Storm — RLIMIT_AS, the ‘address space’, or virtual memory, limit. That limit is now set, so we shouldn’t see this problem anymore. (Nevertheless, we’ll keep a weather eye out for any more problems with Storm. 🙂 -Scott