jmleonar@CRDC.ARPA ("Dr. Joseph M. Leonard") (07/24/86)
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This is a followup posting in regards to problems that we've had with VMS
Version 4.4. Earlier, I posted that there have been intermittant failures
of 4.4, occuring every 10-14 days. Well, yesterday things got a bit worse...
We experienced four failures in the course of a six-hour period! All of the
failures have had the same symptom - total inertia, no responses to any attempt
to query or interrupt a task, or even to the <cr> on terminals not logged on.
Because of these failures, we have reverted to 4.3 until (a) additional failures
suggest a hardware problem or (b) there is a consensus/resolution on the
problem(s) noticed with 4.4.
During the failures yesterday, we monitored the addresses that the system was
looping while unresponsive. These occur in 4(5?) groups:
YCDRIVER, TTDRIVER and two/three areas "near" the two drivers...
As additional information, I managed to crash the system by typing random
character strings (quickly) into EDT. After this crash, the system was
rebooted, and two users were running a demo that involved a lot of
terminal output, and the system crashed in 3-5 minutes... At the time
of this last failure, no batch jobs were running.
Our system is a 730, 2 DMF-32, 2 RA-81, and other peripherals (yes, I know
that it's overloaded, but...). Except for the last failure, there were
3-4 batch jobs running, and 5-8 interactive users. The load has been
relatively constant for the last few years (yes, we're buying more hardware),
and has seen VMS 3.0 through 4.4.
Basically, this (re)posting is an attempt to get additional comments and
dialog on this problem. As there is a fair number of DEC personnel that
see this bboard, PLEASE feel free to enter any criticism of my suspected
cause for the trouble. With additional information (or suggestions to get
additional information), I can start the SPR proceedure...
If I got something here, will we see VMS 4.5, or a mandatory patch, or...
Joe Leonard
<jmleonar@crdc.arpa>
Disclaimer: The views of my employer do not conform to my views, or to any
accepted standard of logic that the Greeks thought up anyway...