[realtek] ..rtl8139...annoying consistant madness about memory squeeze..

[Fruitbat]

 Heya Folks!



              I am having this consistant and persistant problem with
rtl8139, wherein it gets the wobblies and starts barfing;

Memory squeeze ; packet deferred


...all over the console. I'm totally unprepared with the nitty-gritty of
it, I thought I'd hit the list first. I found one reference to this
problem, suggesting it was a issue with ram (or lack there-of) , so
promptly gave the machines more ram than they know what to do with...and
the problem persists. If the problem does manifest itself (and there
>seems< to be no specific pattern), it will turn the linux box to jello and need the big hurl reboot to regain sanity. The machines are all squid cache proxy boxes...no two are exactly the same hardware wise, I believe I have observed it with 2.2.14~>.16 .

  I'm currently working around the problem by ba$hing the machines into
a shutdown -r if the error message is intercepted. I have also noticed
you have to do this pretty early on in the passage of events, because if
it's left to sit there spewing this error for toooo long, the machine
will go braindead during the shutdown cycle. Some machines are wearing
up to 4 nics, others a single...doesn't matter either way. The only
other noteable thing is they are transparent squids running the tproxy
redirector/ipchains/cisco route-map  arrangement, so they are a bit
busier "unto themselves" than just a *plain* squid..



       Anyone got any ideas or pointers to more on this? (sorry is I
missed it in the archives)




        Cheers!