I posted this to the NFS list and was told to post
here.
I have a box with 4GB. It's running Red Hat Fedora Core
3 with 2.6.10 as distributed by them. No custom kernel
compiling, and no desire :)
The problem reported below DID NOT happen with 2.4.21.
It did happen also with 2.6.9, and I cannot comment on
other kernels. So, it happens with 2.6.9 and 2.6.10,
but not 2.4.21, and anything else has not been tried.
I am trying to run Iozone with -g and an argument to it
that is larger than the physical memory in the NFSv3
client machine.
For instance, on this 4GB box, I am trying '-g 4224m'.
More specifically, the entire command line is:
./iozone -a -g 4224m -f /sol9box/testfile
As soon as it finally gets to trying a file size of
4194304, oom-killer steps in and starts blasting
processes off my machine. NFS stops functioning,
RPC calls to the box fail, SSH connections are no
longer accepted, and I generally have to hard
powercycle the box.
Reference: http://www.iozone.org/