[plug] Unstable (not as in distribution) Debian Box

[Ryan]

I know this is like asking you to tell me why my car crashed and burst
into flames by showing you the door handle, but does this tickle any
obvious causes from anyone?

The box rarely hard crashes like this.  It has ECC ram - SCSI
everything, but it is very old (HP E45).  Memtest left running for 12
hours or so didn't find any probs, HDDs are good.  Running Debian -
mostly stable 2.4.18

Often processes go zombie during the morning updatedb stuff after random
amounts of uptime (normally 1-2 weeks+) and I end up with several
(sometimes hundreds) of sh and find calls that fork a fair bit then go
to bed.  That sends the load into the 20s (but the machine still
responds normally), slowly other processes refuse to work and sendmail
refuses to deliver at such high loads, so I get error emails to that
effect and i reboot.

My uneducated guess - all the zombie things filled up lots of memory and
swap filled up and it had troubles dealing with it?   Why would
everything be falling in a heap in the first place though?

This time it crashed hard:

Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:  <1>Unable to handle kernel paging
request at virtual address 01334d84
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:  printing eip:
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: c013e5ef
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: *pde = 00000000
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: Oops: 0002
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: CPU:    0
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: EIP:    0010:[prune_icache+103/204]   
Not tainted
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: EFLAGS: 00010246
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: eax: 01334d80   ebx: c4f315e8   ecx:
00000000   edx: c1334d80
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: esi: c4f315e0   edi: c4f317c8   ebp:
c73b7e30   esp: c73b7e18
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: Process sh (pid: 3968,
stackpage=c73b7000)
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: Stack: 00000014 000001d2 00000020
0000079b c4f31408 c9504088 00000006 c013e66f 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:        00001b16 c01275ed 00000006
000001d2 00000006 000001d2 00000006 000001d2 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:        c02d0208 c02d0208 c02d0208
c0127633 00000020 c73b6000 00000120 00000000 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: Call Trace: [shrink_icache_memory+27/48]
[shrink_caches+109/124] [try_to_free_pages+55/88]
[balance_classzone+78/360] [__alloc_pages+262/356] 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:    [_alloc_pages+22/24]
[do_wp_page+133/376] [handle_mm_fault+123/180] [do_page_fault+352/1164]
[do_page_fault+0/1164] [copy_mm+656/700] 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel:    [sys_rt_sigaction+159/324]
[error_code+52/60] 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: 
Sep 12 06:26:43 slowest kernel: Code: 89 50 04 89 02 89 73 f8 89 73 fc
8b 45 f8 89 58 04 89 03 8d 

Ryan