Recently I deployed an ALIX 2c0 with m0n0wall 1.3b16 (captive portal enabled) at a site with about 100 simultaneous users. Every evening during peak usage hours it starts to reboot once every few minutes. The time between reboots is directly proportional to how many users are using the system.
At the highest peak around 10 PM, the box would reboot every 1-2 minutes. The users are very insistent and they would keep logging back in to use the system even if it keeps kicking them out. When the load goes down at around 2 AM, the box becomes completely stable, and stays up throughout the day until the next evening.
During day time, there are only about 5-10 users and they're all people that left the computers turned on at home to download torrents, so the bandwidth usage is still high, just less users.
Looking at the console I found kernel panics and kmem_map too small. A search turns up old posts with others having similar problems and apparently no resolution.
At first I thought maybe my ALIX's 128 MB RAM was too small, but when I installed pfSense (had to upgrade BIOS for that) on the same box, I could get weeks of uptime without any problems.
So I'm curious if others are also still experiencing this problem? Since my PC running m0n0wall happened to crash today, I'll try replacing it with another ALIX box (now with updated BIOS) and m0n0wall 1.3b18 too see if it makes any difference.
Topic: ALIX 2 reboots under load