:)  Your memory was keener than mine, actually.  As I tail'd the log
when it came back up, I saw the message "Starting Garbage
Collection", and it reminded me about this issue from a couple of
years back..  A strange phenomena with this application
(SqueakSource+Magma) and VM that, upon completion of the initial
loading of the root SSRepository object, at some later time whenever
the first garbage collection after that would take like 2 minutes.
But, after that, it was pretty much fine, pretty snappy.

So, rather than the enduring that pain at a random time, I decided
that at a known time was better.  On startup.


On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 9:36 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 09:09:00PM -0600, Chris Muller wrote:
>> >> I was able to VNC right into the server image.  It is responsive,
>> >> however, there are a ton of processes apparently stuck on a
>> >> Mutex>>#critical: block.  I think that explains the timeouts.
>> >>
>> >> The service was last restarted 204 days ago.  I'll contact box-admins
>> >> and board about restarting the service, that should clear it up.
>> >
>> > and for my information what version of Squeak and what VM is it running?
>>
>> The production VM released with Squeak 5.1.
>>
>>     5.0-201608171728  Sun Sep 25 16:02:24 UTC 2016 gcc 4.6.3
>> [Production Spur VM]
>>
>> It's been a few months since I tried the most recent VM.  All the
>> newer ones I'd ever tried since the GC rewrite would crash more often
>> than I could bear.
>>
>> I run this same code base and VM to support my own code repository as
>> a local daemontools service.  It doesn't have the volume
>> source.squeak.org has, but it has been stable for me.
>>
>
> I think that my mention of garbage collection as a possible cause is
> a red herring. Likewise my mention of Magma backing store. Those were
> just the only two things I could think of that were obviously different
> from the other squeaksource image that we are running.
>
> In any case, 204 days of continuous service without a restart is nothing
> to be unhappy about :-)
>
> Dave
>