[Nottingham] LVM and load balancing and ReiserFS

[Peter Chang]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Duncan John Fyfe wrote:
> It depends really.  On 32bit RHEL4 (2.6.13) the thread stack size is 4K
> and I have seen RHEL4 systems with 3 x (hardware) RAID5 + LVM2 + XFS +
> NFS bork once a week with stack overflows.  Patching the RH kernel to
> use 8K stacks eliminated this except for the occasional fubar when the
> system is under very heavy load.
> Much work has been done since 2.6.13 to reduce the stack usage of
> stacked filesystem components (of which RAID+LVM2+XFS is just one
> example) but you still see reports of "4k stack bad, 8k stack good"
> especially for FC6 and FC7 which have 4k stacks by default.

I think Fedora has had 4k stacks since FC4. I'm running mythtv on a 
Shuttle Pentium M machine. I don't do much networking on it, certainly not 
NFS, and the load is fairly trivial.

Checking the messages log shows no error messages.

[...]

> You've been running without trouble for 18 months.  You may well run
> fine for the rest of the configurations life.  Your call.
> My experience of stack overflows so far has been some acceptable data
> loss and a few inconvenient (Monday morning) reboots.

Thanks for the info. I'll leave sleeping dogs to lie.

Cheers
  Peter


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