system starting to freeze/crash

[krakadikt5k]

I've got a E450 with 4x400hmz cpus and about 780megs ram (not in any way proper sets of ram) and it's been fairly stable for the last year. I changed the kernel from 2.4 to 2.6 in oct, so that might be it, but this behaviour only started in the last 2 months or so(i think/myabe).

but now it seems to break down under heavy disk io. I've got 4 18.2 gig drives, 1 as root (/, ext2) and the other 3 as a raid5 array(/mnt/media,ext2). At first it seemed that under heavy IO to the raid array it something would go wrong and programs wouldn't work anymore, and if there was an open ssh connection all you would get was a messega along the lines of 'Bus IO fault' so i took my raid array out, but it will still break under heavy io (eg 3+ concurrent emerge sessions).

I'm thinking this might be the kernel, and maybe i should change to a more sparc-pci friendly kernel. right now I'm using gentoo-sources linux-2.6.17-gentoo-r4. any segestions?

-dan
ps in the future i'll try to make my posts a little less wordy

[likwid]

I'd try a newer kernel, then start thinking about new drives or controller. One of my FC drives seemed to crap out after a little bit of transfer, random no matter what. I replaced it with an extra one I had laying around and the problem didn't persist. So drives can also cause problems like this. What would happen is it would seem like it wasn't connected to the system anymore. So I would umount then mount again and i would be able to write for a short period of time. I would get I/O errors. This was solaris. Linux got something a little bit different.