Sun-4 slows down like molasses

[nesheim at think.com]

> From:    sitongia at hao.ucar.edu (Leonard Sitongia)
> 
> We have seen a bizarre phenomenon on this machine.  Periodically (happened
> three times today) it will appear that the system has died in that
> directly connected terminals and rlogins hang up on terminals that are
> logged in and when an attempt is made to log in usually there is no
> response or maybe login is allowed but no motd is printed (or other stuff
> the user may do in the .login) and then the terminal hangs.  The system
> appears to have become tremendously busy. {B^D>
...

I've seen this happen when you run out of STREAMS buffers.  When the
machine gets into a weird state, do a "netstat -m" and look at the stream
allocation table.  If you see allocation failures you will have to
increase the stream parameters.  Look at
/usr/share/sys/sun?/YOURMACHINE/param.c for the lines that define NBLKXXX.
Up them until you no longer get stream allocation failures.

-- Bill Nesheim; Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA +1 617-876-1111
   nesheim at think.com, {harvard,bloom-beacon,topaz}!think!nesheim