[wellylug] Debain aptitude causes various tasks to stop

[Jethro Carr]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 09:26 +1100, Peter Lynch wrote:
> I run a Debian server, and most days log in and run sudo aptitude
> update and, if necessary, sudo aptitude safe-upgrade.  My problem is
> that quite often a number of tasks (from one or two to almost
> everything) dies.  Today, after running update, nscd and clamav-daemon
> died.  I use monit to keep track of these and other tasks, and it
> restarted them a couple of minutes later.  About 15 minutes later, I
> ran safe-upgrade and this time, nscd, clamav-daemon and named all
> died.  Again, monit restarted them all after a couple of minutes.  On
> other occasions in the past, so many tasks have been killed that (a) I
> loose my ssh session, and (b) I have to restart my server to get
> everything up and running again.
> 
> Does anyone know what the cause of this behaviour might be?  Are there
> any log files I should be checking?

Does the server have sufficient memory and swap space?

Sounds like apt might be running, using too much memory (perhaps due to
a number of updates), the server runs out of memory and kills off
processes.

You should see log references to out of memory error
in /var/log/messages.


The 'free' command will also show you available memory, look at the
stats that exclude the cache/buffers for the real free memory and also
check how much swap is available.

regards,
jethro


-- 
Jethro Carr
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog
www.amberdms.com
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