A couple months ago I upgraded my server to RH 7.1 (with the 2.4.2-2 red
hat kernel). At first it ran fine, but now after an uptime of 67 days
I'm starting to see strange problems. It seems as if only a very small
amount of memory can be held in the output buffer of each socket, even
though they are still set to 64KB! There isn't a tremendous amount of
network traffic going on (about 30-100 sockets open at a time, but
rather low total bandwidth). The fact that each write to a socket only
writes a few (<8) kbytes is really messing with my performance. I did
not see this problem until the past week. I tried to trace through the
kernel code to see why the kernel would be refusing to give me the
buffering that I ask for, and it looks like if the network code thinks
that it is using too much memory, then it will behave this way. I'm not
100% sure of this, though...which is why I'm posting this message.
Does anybody have any hints on how I can track down exactly why my
output buffers aren't working? I see lots of /proc info related to
network parameters, but there is little documentation on them. Is there
a known bug like this in the RH 2.4.2-2 kernel? Would a newer kernel
help me? (I know, I could just try upgrading and waiting another 60
days, but 24x7 reliability is very important to my users so I'd rather
not reboot unless I know that it will help). I searched the archives of
this mailing list, and found a few interesting references network memory
consumption in the changelog of the Alan Cox series, but nothing that
explicitly described a problem like this. Thanks to anybody who can help
me out here.
--Bill Shubert (wms@igoweb.org) <mailto:wms@igoweb.org> http://www.igoweb.org/~wms/ <http://igoweb.org/%7Ewms/>
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