problem: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed
I have noticed few times during last days that sometime system runs
out of memory (always when I am not nearby) and kills a program or two
and then everything's fine (it kills different programs each time so I
am pretty sure the killed program is not the one that causes problems)
here's the message in /var/log/syslog (irrelevant messages before and
after):
Nov 22 04:34:19 localhost kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation
failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) from c0127d7e
Nov 22 04:34:24 localhost kernel: VM: killing process XFree86
usually it kills more programs, system services (cron) etc... I have
few question related to this problem:
- is it possible it's kernel problem? I haven't heard anything too
weird about 2.4.10
- how can I find (post mortem) which program caused the problem?
- how does kernel decide which programs to kill? is there any way to
influence it? I would rather have netscape (usually a memory hog) killed
than system services (like samba daemons, cron, nfs daemons etc.)
my system:
debian unstable
kernel 2.4.10
X 4.1.0.1
usually running:
X
netscape & mozilla
xmms
few xterms
fvwm, gkrellm, chbg
memory usage now (without reboot, after the above mentioned problem),
this is how it looks most of the time
jojda:/home/erik# free
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 385472 358020 27452 0 12624
244264
-/+ buffers/cache: 101132 284340
Swap: 243104 55984 187120
related incident: I have quite a few mp3 files and I noticed that when
I sort playlist in xmms by song name it eats all available memory (and
does the same after I restart it, I didn't even find any relevant
setting in config file but when I remove it problem goes away). I have't
tried it before so I don't know whether it's new problem or old one (I
haven't find anything similar on xmms or debian page so I filed a bug
report)
any ideas on how to troubleshoot this problem?
TIA!
erik
erik
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