Re: Cron jobs run out of memory?
On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 10:06:37 +0800
Uwe Dippel <udippel@uniten.edu.my> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 20:40:13 +0100, Jacob S wrote:
<snip>
> > I should have mentioned - I have gotten this error with 768MB of ram
> > installed before too. How much ram do I need before I have "enough"?
>
> I bet you find something when you google. I wouldn't want to argue
> further. Once you have - let's say - 200 MB free and it fails, I'd be
> more tempted to consider the case questionable. It doesn't matter how
> much RAM you have (or swap), there must be enough.
Ok. I'll do some more research. (And sorry, this is not meant to be an
argument on my part. I just figured this would be a good time for me to
learn more about the internals of my favorite OS.)
> > Since it's running in the middle of the night, and is the only cron
> > job running at that time, I would have expected the system to find
> > some memory that it could free up somewhere.
>
> What is 'somewhere', except it kills one or another ? 'Freeing up'
> means from RAM into swap. But your swap is full as well.
I think my confusion is coming from the fact that I don't know enough
about how Linux utilizes ram, swaps some out, cleans out unneeded stuff,
etc. Are normal jobs from the cli treated differently from cron jobs,
even when both are being run as the same user?
After all (to the best of my knowledge), the same programs are running
in the middle of the night as are running in the day time when I execute
the script manually. I am not closing any programs to run it
manually, neither do I see any get killed or find oom messages in
syslog. How is it finding ram that it can use when I execute it
manually, yet it can't find enough ram when it is being run from cron?
I'm guessing it prioritizes stuff, but what and how?
On the other hand, Woody rarely touched more than 50MB of swap when I
had 768MB of ram, so I guess it's probably time to upgrade my ram now
that I'm running Sarge. (Yes, I run a couple extra Firefox windows and
use xine a lot more in Sarge, so it's not "just" the upgrade.)
Thanks again,
Jacob
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