*BSD News Article 21203


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!waikato!aukuni.ac.nz!kcbbs!dgd
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Re: ed0: warning - reciever ring buffer overflow
From: dgd@kcbbs.gen.nz (David Dix)
Date: 20 Sep 93 13:22:39 GMT
Message-ID: <1593262.48159.15446@kcbbs.gen.nz>
References: <RAND.93Sep17103923@agassiz.cas.und.NoDak.Edu> <g89r4222.748432320@kudu> <RAND.93Sep19131545@agassiz.cas.und.NoDak.Edu>
Organization: Kappa Crucis Unix BBS, Auckland, New Zealand
NNTP-Posting-Host: aklobs.org.nz
Lines: 63

Douglas Rand writes:
>

Douglas Rand writes:
>>>>>> "Rand" == Douglas K. Rand <rand@cs.und.nodak.edu>
>>>>>> "Geoff" == Geoff Rehmet <g89r4222@kudu.ru.ac.za>
>
>    Rand> I've been getting a lot of these warnings:
>    Rand> ed0: warning - reciever ring buffer overflow
>
>    Geoff> In my experience this can happen occasionally (when you are
>    Geoff> loading the network heavily) and isn't really worth
>    Geoff> worrying about.
>
>I probably wasn't very clear in my original post. In a span of 10
>minutes I've gotten over 100 of these warnings. They almost always
>happen when I'm heavily using NFS, and they even seem to cause
>
> nfs server <host>:<mnt-point>: not responding
> nfs server <host>:<mnt-point>: is alive again
>

Wow, just 100 :-) I think the last counts I made got to over 5000 of these
messages over a few days.
Anyway I ignore them and everything seems to keep on working.
I strongly suspect that they have a lot to do with NFS.
I have two 386bsd systems (486DX50/esdi/isa and 486DX250/scsi/eisa)
networked together using ed0 driver on both. One has a real WD8003 card
and the other has an SMC plus elite 8bit. The isa system with the 8003
reports zillions of these messages, it is the esdi system and has a 500meg
NFS mounted partion from the scsi on the eisa system.
The eisa system stores usenet news and is real busy. News comes into it
via nntp through a pcrouter box with 48k dds link. Never once in months
have I seen this system report the receiver ring buffer overflow
message. Its as stable as a rock.
When everything is busy and nntp is moving in news at about 4k/second
and there are lots of bbs people using news via NFS then there is a
continuous stream of these overflow messages on the isa system with the
8003 card. There are so many that its impossible to use any of the root
virtual screens as "last message repeated xxx times" seems to march ever
onwards up the screen.
What makes me suspect NFS has lots to do with this is that a while ago
everybody here was using tin newsreader for a week or so, the version that
uses nntp to extract news over the network. There was the odd few overflow
messages but more like a few tens per day instead of zillions of zillions.
NFS was not in use at that time. When I got really pi**ed off with tin and
trying to get its index file building to use less than 99% of disk and cpu
and grinding the network to a near dead halt I reinstalled NFS and then
had news available via NFS. I kicked out tin and used a simpler newsreader
but almost immediately the dreaded ed0 overflow messages took over the
root consoles :-(
SOmething sure is wrong if so many packets are being junked but performace
still seems real good, NFS performance is the best I have ever seen.

My next step is to get another SMC Elite 8 bit card and see if this makes
any difference - maybe my WD8003 is too ancient to cope with that
excellent ed0 driver.
If that fails then its time to edit out the warning message.
Can anyone suggest what the problem/cure might be?

dgd