Re: system hangs

Are you running Solaris 2.6? If so, you might be running into an OS bug, which we ran into on our ES6000. When the engine is hanging, you should still be able to do onstats. If it happens again, check to see if the ADM VP is still alive. Do an onstat -g glo to find the Process ID of the ADM VP. Then do a ps -ef | grep <pid> on that process ID, and if the process is gone, you've hit our bug. Basically, the ADM VP tries to fork off the alarm program, and because of the OS bug, the ADM VP gets a SEGV (segmentation fault) and the process dies. The Informix engine keeps happily plunking along for a while, until it gets to be time for a checkpoint. The engine will go into a blocking mode (BLOCKED: CKPT_REQ), but will just sit there, because the ADM VP is what schedules checkpoints, and since it ain't there any more, the checkpoint never happens. The engine is now hung. Can't shut it down, either, because when you take the engine from On-Line to Quiescent mode, it first calls for a checkpoint. Without the ADM VP it can't do a checkpoint, and therefore it can't go to quiescent. Kill -9 is your only way out. As Informix-intensive as this sounds, it's actually a Solaris bug. A problem in the OS fork() routine causes the SEGV, something about a frame pointer getting clobbered. If you have any other questions or want more details, please feel free to contact me in private e-mail. - Tom Girsch Database Systems Manager Arch Communications Group, Inc. Cindy Alford wrote in message <72e8up$bmi$1@news.xmission.com>... > > >Hello, > >System Specs: > Sun Enterprise 5000 > 1 Gb RAM > IDS 7.24.UC5 > >Earlier this week, our database engine hung. There was no error >message, >users could not connect, and we could not shut the database down. We >finally did a 'kill -9' on the processes, rebooted the server, and then >did >an index check. We have no idea what is causing this problem. Informix >support hasn't been able to give us any good clues. > >Anyone have any ideas? > >Thanks, > >cindy > > >========================== >cindy_alford@ymd.yamaha-motor.nl >Yamaha Motor Distribution > > > > >