On Monday 31 May 2021 at 21:25:18, Marc Shapiro via Dng wrote:

> I received this e-mail yesterday, and again today:
>
> -----------------------------------------
> exim paniclog /var/log/exim4/paniclog on quixote.home has non-zero size,
> mail system might be broken. The last 10 lines are quoted below.
>
> 2021-05-29 19:35:47 daemon: fork of queue-runner process failed: Cannot
> allocate memory
> -----------------------------------------

> The one clue that I have is that something (I am fairly sure that it was a
> Firefox tab) completely locked my system on Saturday night. Everything
> started slowing down. Mousing became erratic. Then everything completely
> stopped.

That certainly sounds like Firefox eating all memory (and probably going
through the swap space too).

> I couldn't even switch to a terminal where I could kill Firefox. I finally
> had to simply power down the system. (How I hate doing that!)

Hint for the future - if you have sshd running on this machine, you may well
find you can log in to it from elsewhere and tell it to "reboot". That will at
least shut processes down cleanly (migth take a while) and unmount your file
systems cleanly.

> Is that likely the cause of the above message? If so, is deleting the
> paniclog the proper way to stop receiving these e-mails?

I would say yes to both.

Aside from anything else, unless you get further problems, you don't want to
be continually reminded about something that happened on the 29th May.


Antony.

--
Salad is what food eats.

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