garbage

[Barry Margolin <barmar@think.com>]

    Date:    Mon, 14 Dec 87 15:31:00 PST
    From: LAU%PLU@ames-io.arpa

    Symbolics Software Support:
  
      A question about memory usage on a 3640 with 12 MB of main memory.  Within
      6 hours of idle time, two warning messages about memory space came up.  The
      difference between the amount of space left in the first message and the
      second was about 500,000 words.  What is using up the space?  The machine was
      idle.  The system has prolog and tcp loaded but at the time, no one was using
      the machine.  This happens so often that the system goes into the fep with a
      message about:  Running out of swap space.  (usually after a weekend)
  
      sonie
      arpanet address:  lau@ames-pluto.arpa

We saw something like this happen to most of our Symbolics machines
once.  We have a number of diskless Sun workstations on the network, and
had a power failure that took many of them down simultaneously.  When
they came back up they all broadcast a bunch of TFTP requests looking
for their boot programs.  This caused a large number of TFTP server
processes to be consed on the Lisp Machines.

We "solved" this problem by disabling the TFTP server on our Lisp
Machines.

                                                barmar