>Number:         10515
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       System freeze with ps/top
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       high
>Responsible:    kern-bug-people
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Wed Jul 05 17:29:00 PDT 2000
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Lennart Augustsson
>Release:        NetBSD-current 2000-07-03
>Organization:
>Environment:

>Description:
	With fairly heavy system activity the system sometimes freezes totally
	when ps or top is invoked.  The system is totally locked up and CTL-ALT-ESC
	does not help.
	I've now repeated this on two 1.5B systems, one is an IOpener (with a WinChip
	CPU and 32M memory) and the other and ordinary Pentium II box (with 128M RAM).
	The conditions always seem to be pretty much the same, fairly heavy disk activity
	and a loaded CPU together with low memory conditions.  When ps/top is started
	the machine freezes at once.
>How-To-Repeat:
	See above.
>Fix:
	I have no clue.  Did something bad creep in with the new sysctl interface that
	ps uses?
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: