Re: Dying services due to low memory?
On Sat, Sep 18, 1999 at 11:17:13AM +0200, Ralf G. R. Bergs wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> can anyone point me to a solution for the following problem?
>
> 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?!
As far as I know the Unix processes don't care if something is physical
memory or not. They simply use virtual memory and it's kernel's job to
proviede it to them.
As for the memory amount, i don't think that running a box at its full
memory capabilities does something bad to Linux. I myself used to administer
a box which had as little as 8 MB of RAM (Pentium 90Mhz) with the following
services: httpd, ftpd, squid and sometimes even X!
It was trashing horribly, but was usable and hardly ever crashed.
So it's not the amount of physical memory you have.. i'd rather think of
making more swap (don't know how much your box has...), since some peaks in
memory usage can be lethal to Linux.
Really, i've heard of guys who have a GB of swap on their boxes and are
thinking of increasing it...
just a thought
Marcin
--
--------------------------------
Marcin Owsiany
porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl
--------------------------------
Reply to: