[Gllug] What happened to make my server run all those processes?

[Nix]

On Mon, 05 Jun 2006, John Winters said:
> I'm still trying to figure out what had happened.  Unfortunately I
> wasn't able to get a list of the running processes before I re-booted
> it, but there didn't seem to be anything odd there - just vast numbers
> of the same processes.

With no logs and no process listing we're pretty much stuck, but one cause
of this is something oopsing while a filesystem-related lock (often a
superblock lock) is taken out. From then on, everything which touches
that fs will go into D state... and if, say, the mail spool is there,
new processes will fork() as more mail comes in...

> so through the night.  When I came to the system this morning, the user
> "secvpn" was logged in many dozens of times (didn't manage to count
> them) instead of the usual once.

Perhaps it was a VPN-related oops?

> I've checked the log files carefully but can't see anything which might
> have triggered the events.

No oopsen?

> Anyone ever experienced anything like this before?  Is there a process
> failure which would cause other processes to keep replicating?

I'd expect this is a D-state stall of a forking server process, instead.

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