Messages in this thread | | | From | furio ercolessi <> | Subject | Problem: Alpha, 2.2.7 "fork: Cannot allocate memory" | Date | Sun, 20 Jun 1999 16:37:52 METDST |
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Hello linux-kernel,
I am not a list reader but I have been recommended to let you guys aware of my problem.
h/w: Alpha 21164/533 MHz, LX board, 512 MB RAM base installation: RedHat 5.2 kernel: 2.2.7 compiled with: gcc version egcs-2.90.29 980515 (egcs-1.0.3 release) swap: 256MB in a single partition defaults changed: NR_OPEN from 1024 to 16384 (fs.h, limits.h) NR_FILE from 4096 to 16384 (fs.h) OPEN_MAX from 256 to 4096 (limits.h) __FD_SETSIZE from 1024 to 16384 (posix_types.h) operational conditions: postfix (MTA) and squid (web caching) in a production environment
Problem: occasionally the system refuses to start new processes, apparently without a valid reason. Here is an example: ------------------------------------------------- # man ps Formatting page, please wait... sh: fork: Cannot allocate memory sh: fork: Cannot allocate memory Error executing formatting or display command. [...] # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 516720 510696 6024 71416 214536 97896 -/+ buffers/cache: 198264 318456 Swap: 262136 2280 259856 -------------------------------------------------
Of the 198MB used, about 120MB were used by squid. There were about 100 processes active. NR_TASKS was the default of 512; raising it to 4096 did not help. I also tried to add an additional 1GB of swap (on a file), which did not help either.
This problem did not appear when running postfix only (which generates quite a bit of processes but does not use much memory), or squid only (which uses a lot of memory but is essentially a single-process application): it required both products to operate simultaneously to manifest. Memory allocation by squid appeared to be regular (that is, "Total in use" only slightly larger than "Total accounted").
I moved to 2.0.37 and the problem disappeared. Unfortunately I am not in the position to do further testing with 2.2.x right now.
furio ercolessi Spin - Trieste (Italy)
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