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Re: Dying services due to low memory?



On Sat, 18 Sep 1999 14:37:06 +0200, Marcin Owsiany wrote:

[...]
>> 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.

Well, this is also my information. Seems to be common knowledge. :)

>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!

For about a year I ran a similar machine: It also acted as an answering and 
fax reception machine. Everything was fine, even with only 8 megs.

>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.

This is what I'm currently blaming for the dying of the processes. I have 
drastically increases swap sizes, and I will observe whether this solves my 
problems.

Thanks,

Ralf


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