Jacob S wrote:
$ freetotal used free shared buffers cached Mem: 516308 514288 2020 0 1712 101836 -/+ buffers/cache:410740 105568 Swap: 497968 467868 30100Any suggestions what might be causing this out of memory problem, or ways to work around it?
Not counting buffers and cache, you are using 410740 kilobytes of physical memory and 467868 kilobytes of swap, for a total of 878608 kilobytes. That is really very very much. It seems you are running one or more very memory-intensive processes.
Using more swap and/or installing more RAM would probably solve your problem, but if I were you I would investigate why your system is using that much memory in the first place. As a first step, I'd start top and sort by memory usage.
-- "Codito ergo sum" Roel Schroeven