Hello Andrew,
Now this happens for the third time.
I've just reproduced this lockup with 2.6.3.
You may need a serial console to be able to capture all the output.
Also, it would be useful to know what sort of load the machines are
under, and what filesystems are in use.
The machine is a http server. The main applications are:
1) apache 1.3 which serves php pages (mod_php):
15.3 requests/sec - 111.9 kB/second - 7.3 kB/request
54 requests currently being processed, 19 idle servers
2) mysql:
Threads: 19 Questions: 26922012 Slow queries: 9799 Opens: 64980
Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 630 Queries per second avg: 143.547
This is an IO bound machine in general. All filesystems are reiserfs.
Here is a sysrq-T output obtained from a locked box via serail console:
OK, so everything is stuck trying to allocate memory. Perhaps you ran out
of swapspace, or some process has gone berzerk allocating memory.
The memory exhaustion is indeed possible for this box. I'll double check
ulimit and /etc/security/limits.conf stuff. The only thing which worries
me that this box had been running for months without any problems with
2.4.23aa1.
I have added another 2Gb to swap space (hope this give enough time
to find the memory hungry process(es)).