[LON-CAPA-admin] Serious troubles with lonmaxima

Stefan Bisitz st.bisitz at fh-wolfenbuettel.de
Mon Jul 23 11:08:12 EDT 2007


Hi,

Back from some days of holiday I experience still the same issues with
server overload caused by maxima. We use LON-CAPA 2.4.1. Since some
weeks now we have a few authors creating and testing LON-CAPA problems
which use <mathresponse>, <formularesponse> without sampling points
and/or the new perl/LON-CAPA function &cas.

What is going wrong?
#1: problems using &cas: It happens appr. every 20-30 new problem
variations, that the server stops working and cancels the process after
the default 10 seconds ("code run too long" message). Re-click on "Reset
Submissions" works fine, no stop. Hence it's not a problem with a bad
choice of randomized values.
#2: From time to time lisp processes overload the server. They use each
more than 99% of CPU (2 x 3 GHz and nearly no users working). "Server
Load" shows 150%, 550% or even 1700% (!!!)

#1 and #2 occur on SLES9 machine, #2 also occurs on the FC5 machine. I
am not sure about a connection between #1 and #2. More tests will follow.

Any ideas what could go wrong?
Are there any changes with maxima in LON-CAPA 2.4.2? Is it worth
updating (concerning this issue)?

Thanks for any help,
Stefan Bisitz




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