Out of memory problem
I've started to have a problem of my computer running out of memory. It's on
a work computer and it happens during the middle of the night so I'm not here
actively doing anything. The machine has 256MB of RAM and 517MB of swap
space.
In the morning, several of the programs I left running the night before have
been killed, and the syslog has several entries like
Sep 8 23:57:28 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 28828
(apache).
Sep 8 23:57:37 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29430
(apache).
Sep 8 23:57:48 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 727
(kdeinit).
Sep 9 00:07:46 ktaylor-pc vmunix: Out of Memory: Killed process 29438
(apache).
Sep 9 00:05:39 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29437
(apache).
Sep 9 00:08:44 ktaylor-pc vmunix: Out of Memory: Killed process 29440
(apache).
Sep 9 00:08:38 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29439
(apache).
Sep 9 00:08:49 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29441
(apache).
Sep 9 00:08:53 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29459
(apache).
Sep 9 00:09:00 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 29462
(apache).
Sep 9 00:09:07 ktaylor-pc kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 1640
(kdeinit).
The most recent time, there were a total of 67 messages, mostly apache
processes were killed. Shortly before processes start getting killed, I see
the following lines from "ps -aux"
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 368 41.1 67.8 519176 174292 ? D 13:47 218:35
/usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp vt7 -auth /var/lib/kdm/A:0-0B9JDi
kurt 1640 0.0 0.0 23464 144 ? S 13:48 0:31 kdeinit:
konsole
kurt 2010 5.1 21.6 161480 55676 pts/0 D 13:48 27:21 rdesktop -g
1124x800 [IP address deleted]
It appears as if X-windows and rdesktop are consuming all the memory. The
last process killed is konsole (PID=1640) which was used to start the
rdesktop session, so it is killed along with konsole. The output of "ps
-aux" after the processes have been killed shows
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 368 20.2 7.5 32692 19428 ? S Sep08 235:54
/usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp vt7 -auth /var/lib/kdm/A:0-0B9JDi
This leads me to believe that the problem resides with rdesktop, but I don't
know for sure. The problem has occured about 5 times now, and each time
rdesktop is one of the processes that gets killed. Any ideas of anything
else I should check.
--
Kurt Taylor
ktaylor@ferp.ucsd.edu
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