# FreeBSD 9.3 hang on medium load



## ongbenghui (May 5, 2015)

Hi,

I have an old 1U server running FreeBSD 9.3 that I recently upgraded from 8.4.  It is running qmail, dovecot, Apache, etc. Pretty much, light load.

Recently, I am putting up some ffmpeg, and the box will mysteriously "hang".  The box is in a remote DC that I don't have direct serial console attached, but it will respond to ping. It will not respond to any telnet or SSH. I thought it must have lost TCP connection, and I set up a cron script to reboot it every hour while troubleshooting. But to my surprise, even cron stops running when it "hangs".

Any advise on any area that I should look at? Or what is the best way to pull out logs during such trouble?


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## diizzy (May 5, 2015)

/var/log/messages might have a clue, also look for crash dumps.
Posting `dmesg` might also help
//Danne


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## ongbenghui (May 5, 2015)

Unfortunately, there isn't any crash dumps. /var/log/messages is empty during the period of "hang".


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## gkontos (May 5, 2015)

Even if /var/log/messages is empty during that period, it is a good start. `dmesg` also since we have no idea about your system specs. It would also help if we knew how do you invoke ffmpeg and the output of `top` before the system hangs.


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