Hi, > We had one of our MAC-auth radius server instances hang up with this > error at about 0200 this morning. > > That server receives pretty heavy load, and it's bursty, so we see this > a couple of times a day: > > The maximum number of threads (32) are active, cannot spawn new thread > to handle request > > ...but it does not cause problems. An inability to create a new thread > is an entirely different matter though; it implies <max threads are > running, the server tried to create a new one, and the OS couldn't > allocate a thread. > > Any ideas how to resolve this? Version is FreeRadius 1.1.6 (only reason > we haven't upgraded is change control, it's due shortly)
we recently had a similar issue after migrating to using FR for VMPS handling. the system may deal with many hundreds of requests per second as with VMPS the switch re-auths all ports at exactly the same time. with 48 port switches this gets interesting. anyway. the issue was that we had the following config radiusd.conf max_servers = X experimental.conf - perl, max_clones = Y where X != Y this is a big problem and you get the above mentioned errors. you ALSO get the error when X = Y and the load/demand is very high. in this case the radius thread appears to be trying to launch a new PERL instace before the old ones have gone. anyway, a rapid increase of the values helped straight away. as did a proper optimization of the DB to get much much faster PERL code. what you have to ensure in these cases is you dont see these ones: Fri Feb 11 16:00:11 2006 : Error: Discarding duplicate request from client BLAH port 49464 - ID: 10313 due to unfinished request 6 as although seemingly okay the client isnt getting an answer from its requests. alan - List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
