Re: Dying services due to low memory?
"Ralf G. R. Bergs" <rabe@RWTH-Aachen.DE> writes:
> I have several machines running as Internet servers, mainly FTP and HTTP.
> They're relatively low-end machines (P100 and 486-133 with 48 resp. 64 MB
> RAM.) Every couple of days I have to restart inetd or other stand-alone
> services (like syslogd, klogd, snmpd, apache.)
>
> I'm pretty sure the reason why the processes fail is that memory usage is
> too high (it's *definitely* not due to memory problems, like failing RAM
> modules or overclocked CPUs.) Memory usage is permanently about 99%, swap
> usage only a few percent. But obviously processes are dying because they
> can't allocate "real" memory?!
Why do you say that it is "obviously" the reason? The only program
that I have ever seen that needs "real" memory and won't use swap is
javac. In general, if you aren't using swap space then you aren't
running short of memory. The kernel always tries to use all memory
for buffers and cache if it isn't being otherwise used. I don't know
what your problem is, so I can't help any further, but I would look
for other problems before suspecting memory in your case.
--
Carl Johnson carlj@peak.org
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