lpd "resource temporarily unavailable"

[Anthony_141]

We are running Redhat Advanced Server 4 (kernel 2.4.9-e.62) on a ML350 G4p.

We have several G4p's loaded the same and one today stopped printing.

It had only been up about 7 days.

When you did "lpstat -o" to check the print queues we saw "Server load too high". There were no hung print jobs in the /var/spool/lpd queues.

We tried bouncing lpd, but got "dfork failed- Resource temporarily unavailable".

Top, SAR, etc showed fine. Everything else was running fine.

We ended up booting the server and lpd started normally and the users could print.

Googling did not show any useful information.

Any suggestions on what caused this and how to fix it (without booting) in the future would be appreciated.

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello Anthony,

What priting system are u using ? LPRng or CUPS ?

Did you try restarting CUPS ?
Did you try to purge the printing queue ?

Try :

/etc/init.d/cupsd stop
rm -f /var/spool/cups/c00* /var/spool/cups/tmp/*
/etc/init.d/cupsd start

Good lcuk.
Kodjo

[Anthony_141]

We use lpd, not cupsd (hence the lpd references in my original note). But, thanks for the tip anyway!

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

- what is your lpd.conf?
- lpq output?
- something interesting into /var/log/messages?

Rgds,
Vitaly

[Anthony_141]

We never touched lpd.conf (took the defaults).

lpq and message out put was noted in original messages (Server load to high, dfork failed).

[Ivan Ferreira]

"Server load too high", dome daemons, like lpd and sendmail, won't run if the server load is high as indicated in the message, what was the server load (uptime) at the time of the problem? Some runaway process?

[Anthony_141]

"Server load too high", dome daemons, like lpd and sendmail, won't run if the server load is high as indicated in the message, what was the server load (uptime) at the time of the problem? Some runaway process?

We ran Top, SAR, etc. and there was a normal load on the server (which was very, very low - we don't hammer the systems by any means).

Our 2 databases were running fine,and everything else appeared to be normal.

Uptime was only 8 days.

We can't rule out a "runaway process", but idle time was 95% so it's not like the system was being hogged by anything.

[Anthony_141]

Did just see something in the SAR logs:

Before the server was booted, %memused was at 99%. After the reboot it went down to 40%-60% used. Also it looks like we were using most of our Swap pre-reboot.

We ran TOP and it looked "OK" at the time - anyone have any other suggestions on how to trace the memory hog if this happens again?

[Ivan Ferreira]

99% memory usage reported by sar is normal. Linux will always use all memory, if not by programs, by buffers/cache. As you rebooted the system, the buffers/cache was empty, but later will the memory. This is good.

By uptime I mean, the load average reported, not the system uptime itself, for example:

load average: 27.34, 27.20, 27.06

[Anthony_141]

Some load average data from right before we booted:

07:00:00 8 4137 0.01 0.10 0.11
07:10:00 5 4146 0.98 0.46 0.22
07:20:01 2 4159 0.13 0.21 0.17
07:30:00 3 4168 0.07 0.11 0.14
07:40:01 3 4176 0.02 0.07 0.09

07:40:01 runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
07:50:00 1 4181 0.88 0.49 0.24
08:00:00 5 4201 0.05 0.22 0.24
08:10:00 5 4208 0.09 0.17 0.20
08:20:01 2 4213 0.46 0.35 0.25
Average: 5 3985 0.20 0.19 0.17