Re: Kernel doesn't free Cached Memory

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Mon Jul 25 2005 - 11:26:47 EST


Al Boldi wrote:
Dick Johnson wrote: {

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 08:27 -0300, Vinicius wrote:
[...]

I have a server with 2 Pentium 4 HT processors and 32 GB of RAM, this server runs lots of applications that consume lots of memory to. When I stop this applications, the kernel doesn't free memory (the memory still in use) and the server cache lots of memory (~27GB). When I start this applications, the kernel sends "Out of Memory" messages and kill some random applications.


...you might even need to turn memory over-commit off:
echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
}

That's in 2.4. In 2.6 it's:
echo "2" > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

RHEL3 *is* a 2.4 kernel.

But the kernel doesn't honor no-overcommit in either version, i.e. it still
overcommits/pages-out loaded/running procs, thus invoking OOM!

Is there a way to make the kernel strictly honor the no-overcommit request?


Don't have swap?

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/