Hello again all!
Not long ago, I installed DU 4.0D patchkit 3 on our two Alpha Server 4100s,
and starting the next morning we were experiencing what appeared to be
hardware problems. We were getting CMD timeouts and Misc adapter errors
logged at about the same time for three days straight. Only once did this
cause any AdvFS panics and cause filesystem to go unavailable, but it really
had us tied up in knots.
To make a long story short, we discovered that the problem was being caused
by the defragment utility that UNIX so generously inserted into root's
crontab for us. I knew that happened whenever you do an O/S install, but not
a patch install. There were 14 defrag processes running at the same time on
our database server and 5 on our other server, all of which were loading our
shared bus down so much that no other I/O could get through. These processes
took around four hours to finish, and if it weren't for the fact that we
were in the office trying to track down the problem at 1AM, we wouldn't have
found what the problem was.
My question is, when the defragment utility is running, is it okay to kill
it or will that cause serious problems?
Thanks!
-Stephen Spalding
Received on Mon Jun 21 1999 - 20:22:42 NZST