From: Alex Kirk (alexschnarff.com)
Date: Fri Dec 03 2004 - 14:00:28 CST

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Hello All,

I'm running 3.5 on a standard Pentium-4 box with 256MB of RAM. Twice in the past
couple of months, this box has frozen in a very odd way -- while I can still
ping the box, SSH, mail, and web services have all gone away. Tcpdump showed
that a standard SYN/ACK sequence completed properly on the port, and then there
was simply no response from the frozen server -- it was like kernel-land wasn't
properly snagging the inetd and/or the responsible app out of user-land to
transfer the connection to.

The first time this happened, I saw nothing strange at all in my logs. This last
time (it just happened a half-hour or so ago), I did notice something odd in
/var/log/messages, which happened on Nov. 24. I'm not sure it's related to my
freezes, but it still looks like a bad enough thing that I thought it was worth
asking about:

Nov 24 18:35:09 www /bsd: ent_alloc_subregion: can't allocate region descriptor
Nov 24 18:35:10 www /bsd: warning: resource shortage: 1 pages of swap lost
Nov 24 18:35:10 www /bsd: extent_alloc_subregion: can't allocate region descriptor
Nov 24 18:35:10 www /bsd: extent_alloc_subregion: can't allocate region descriptor
Nov 24 18:35:10 www /bsd: warning: resource shortage: 1 pages of swap lost

I got 141 lines worth of this same basic message repeating over all of 3
seconds. Unfortunately, I've not been able to track down any good answers as to
what this means in the mailing lists or via Google.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be going on here, and how to
fix it? I had a friend suggest increasing NMBCLUSTERS and recompliling my
kernel, but beyond that, everyone I've asked has been stumped.

Thanks,
Alex Kirk

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