On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> >
> > > Networking needs to allocate memory at interrupt time. This is
> > > referred to as "atomic allocation". The only way in which this
> > > can be successful is for the VM system to ensure that there is
> > > a pool of immediately-allocatable memory lying around.
> > >
> > > The 2.2 kernel uses the tunables in /proc/sys/vm/freepages to
> > > decide how large that pool should be. Machines which sustain
> > > a high network load commonly require more memory than the
> > > default freepages setting provides. People who encounter network
> > > Rx allocation failures with 2.2 kernels do report that increasing
> > > the freepages tunables fixes the problem.
> > >
> > > -
> > >
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > But... Should the server hang after experiencing problems with this? On
> > 2.2.19?
> >
>
> Absolutely not. If the network driver experiences 32 successive
> memory allocation failures it will fall back to a timer-driven mode
> where it tries to refill its buffer ring once per second. This
> code works.
>
> If your machine is completely locking up and needs a reset then
> something is presumably not handling out-of-memory correctly.
>
> What do you mean by "the server hangs"?
The server locked up and needed a hard reboot
roy
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 21:00:31 EST