Unable to start new processes

[Chris MacDonald]

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 09:40:32PM -0700, Chris MacDonald wrote:
>> When I'd originally posted about the problem, it was occurring on
>> D945GCLF2s, same RAM, same flash drives, but 10.04. On that exact same
>> hardware I've installed 9.10 and haven't had a problem, those machines
>> have been online for over two months straight. Running 10.04, I'd be
>> lucky if they'd last two days. These were also formatted ext3 (both
>> 9.10 and 10.04). Now I'm testing on D510MOs, same RAM, same flash
>> drives, 10.10, ext4 and I'm experiencing the same problem.
>>
>> Part of the reason I started on the Ubuntu users list was because the
>> error was only appearing with 10.04. Now with 10.10 producing errors
>> as well, I'm still inclined to believe it was something in the kernel
>> changing after 9.10. I'm setting up a test that will put a platter HDD
>> in an enclosure on the USB bus to see if perhaps it's something in the
>> kernel's usb implementation that disagrees with the hardware.
>
> Wasn't dpkg changed in 10.04 to do a sync() after every package
> installation?  That could increase the number of writes being made to
> the filesystem.  Enough to trigger errors?  I don't know.
>
> I don't suppose those USB drives support SMART and would tell you the
> number of erase cycles they've experienced?  (System -> Administration
> -> Disk Tool)
>
> Marius Gedminas
> --
> "Actually, the Singularity seems rather useful in the entire work avoidance
> field. "I _could_ write up that report now but if I put it off, I may well
> become a weakly godlike entity, at which point not only will I be able to
> type faster but my comments will be more on-target."        - James Nicoll
>
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>

Ok, first round of testing done. I had three setups, each running
10.10 on an Intel D510MO with 1GB of RAM. The first ('A') was my
control, it had the 4GB Micron eUSB module with default filesystem
options, it crashed in roughly 40 hours. 'B' was still a 4GB eUSB but
I set noatime in the fstab to test out Rashkae's idea, this failed in
24 hours. 'C', and the most interesting, is a SATA hard drive I
plugged in to a SATA-to-USB caddy (05e3:0718), then in to the D510MO,
this failed in 62 hours.

The times I'm not really concerned about for the moment. The
installation on all of them was the same, but there is too much going
on to put much value in to the times. The fact that C failed I think
points me in the direction I need to go; there's something off about
the USB implementation on this motherboard, or a change that was made
to the kernel between 9.10 and 10.10. Does this seem reasonable?

Chris