Re: x86 SMP and RPC/NFS problems

[Andrew Morton]

Alex Kerkhove wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We're running a quite busy mailserver (50.000 mailboxes, 170000+ msgs a
> day) with maildir 'mailboxes' on an NFS volume. The server was running
> redhat 7.1 with i686 2.4.3-12smp kernel.
> 
> Ever since the machine came into full production we've had big problems
> on our dell 2540 dual p3-733, 1Gb RAM machine. At least twice a day we
> would see nfs server timeouts, followed by "can't get request slot"
> messages completeley hanging the machine and only a reboot could get the
> system going again. We've tried every cure known to man to fix this
> problem (changing nics, mount params, interal buffers, etc) no luck.

There were some SMP bugs in the NFS client code a while back but I
don't recall any on the server side.

Is it reproducible with 2.4.7?

What NICs have you tried?  If they were ne2k and/or 3com then
you've been bitten by the APIC bug.

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