On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 8:18 AM Nick Holland <n...@holland-consulting.net> wrote:
> On 10/17/23 05:07, David Higgs wrote: > > I have an underpowered amd64 VPS and attempted to (auto)upgrade it to > 7.4. > > Everything went swimmingly until it attempted to relink the kernel, at > > which point it (seemingly) hung. > > > > With previous releases, I would expect the host to become unresponsive > for > > a few minutes, and eventually recover. I chalked the issue up to > > insufficient RAM and hitting swap - however, my upgrade has been in this > > state for more than 6 hours. > > > > I plan to consult the manual upgrade guide to hopefully figure out a way > to > > successfully finish the install, and then disable relinking while I find > a > > solution. > > > > Does anyone have tips for this situation, aside from throwing more > hardware > > at it? > > I had some issues with a VPS for a while -- absolutely horrific disk > performance. Upgrades that used to take ten minutes (and yes, THAT was > really bad) started taking well over an hour (I gave up, stopped it, and > did it manually by unpacking tar files, coping kernel, etc., so I have no > idea what the actual time was going to be if I had let it complete). I > contacted tech support at the VPS, and they came back with, "oh yeah, you > are on some really old hardware. Please set up a new instance and migrate > to that, that should solve your problem", but since the machine was doing > its usual job just fine (low volume mail and webserver), I was slow to > actually do this. Finally, they sent me notice they were decommissioning > the old hw I was on, and I HAD to move by x/x/xxxx, and thus, I did, and > things are much better. And it turned out, cheaper. > > However, I did find it interesting that my poor disk performance was even > worse when doing the upgrade. > > Moral: might be worth talking to your VPS provider. You might be on old > hw, too. > > A number of releases ago, but after KARL and library relinks1, I found > that on i386, 384MB was required to prevent swapping during the kernel and > library relink at boot. I'm assuming it is "worse" now, and worse yet on > amd64. > For the record, my VPS had 256 MB RAM and another 256 MB of swap. Seems like I can easily provision a new VPS - beefier and for the same price - using their dashboard, so the solution is pretty trivial. Thanks to all who replied! --david --david
