this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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I forced a shutdown of my Linux server by holding down the power button last night after it had been thrashing the harddisk for I don't know how long.
Wouldn't respond to SSH so I just gave up, guess I could have tried to plug in a keyboard and use some magic keys.
Maybe I should just remove the swapfile and let it kill something before it gets to that state. Or is that what swappiness setting is supposed to prevent? Only swap out stuff that is not actively used? In any case defaults don't seem to work very well for me.
Guess I'll have to go boot it again today and try to find out what went wrong from the logs.
Look into
earlyoom
orsystemd-oomd
, the kernel out-of-memory killer will only start killing processes way after it should be. It will happily deadlock itself in a memory swap loop before considering killing any process.There are a lot of other ways to fine tune the kernel to prevent this, but it's a good starting point to prevent your system from freezing. Just keep in mind it will kill processes when memory is running out until enough memory is available.
Thanks, will have a look for next time , too bad those are not the defaults.
For now it seems my ssd is fried (even though swap wasn't on that disk) , lots of I/O Errors and a suspiciously toasted looking chip
Ouch, hope you can get that sorted out. A broken disk my also "deadlock" the system when binaries it tries to start are on that disk and no longer in cache, e.g. sshd or your shell.
In my experience when only ping sporadically works it's an OOM issue, if the ssh login fails weirdly it can also be an I/O issue. If your network is working as expected obviously.