[systemd-devel] Cannot use systemctl after heavy swapping

[Michal Schmidt]

On 11/14/2014 03:20 PM, Jan Janssen wrote:
> I think there might be something wrong with how the rate limiting
> works in manager.c. Just recently, firefox went nuts and got the
> whole system swapping like crazy. After manual OOM killing, the
> system is back to normal, but I can't seem to do any service
> management with systemctl afterwards.
> 
> A simple "sudo systemctl start systemd-timedated.service" will hang
> forever. While the journal keeps getting this message about every
> second: systemd[1]: Looping too fast. Throttling execution a little. 
> while other systemctl actions tend to time out (status, for
> example).

Hi,
are you able to trigger the problem again at will? I'd love to have
a reproducer for this. There've been occasional reports of seeing the
"Looping too fast" message before.

> Interestingly, if I don't use sudo (and instead rely on polkit),
> everything seems to work as expected and I can get things started.

This suggests that PID1's confusion is affecting the private DBus
socket (/run/systemd/private), but its connection to the system bus
is still working.

> This is all on systemd 217 on up-to-date Arch.

Regards,
Michal