free pages

Russell Berry (rberry@albany.net)
Wed, 31 Jul 1996 15:09:46 -0400


I'm running 2.0.8, all new everything, have been for some time now, I
just noticed these popping up in syslog...

# tail /var/log/syslog
Jul 31 10:40:49 seinfeld kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Jul 31 10:43:48 seinfeld kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Jul 31 10:46:55 seinfeld kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Jul 31 12:08:32 seinfeld kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....

several of them here and there, the machine has 16Meg Ram and
32Meg swap, nothing dies, just a growing log. I understand that basically
the kernel is complaining that it can't swap pages, or can't create new
process table entries, but I'm not sure why. This is what's free when
I get this:

free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 14628 14500 128 8776 100 4552
-/+ buffers: 9848 4780
Swap: 32764 13588 19176

anything here I should worry about? Is there any way I can stop this
action?

---russ