Memory usage problems with 2.1.42

Michel Eyckmans (mce@tornado.be)
Sun, 29 Jun 1997 02:21:29 +0200

Recently, I've been getting things like `sh: fork: Out of memory',
`openmailer(local): cannot fork: Out of memory' or even `No more
processes.' (What?? There are less than 50 in total: 30 as root and
about 20 as `me'!) and such thrown at me while doing simple surfing
stuff that used to cause no problems whatsoever in 2.1.29.

Right now, free says:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 30932 30392 540 12920 288 6524
-/+ buffers: 24120 19732
Swap: 72288 9320 62968

With 19 Megs of "freeable" buffer cache and 62+ Megs of free swap space,
I sure would expect things to keep on working a bit longer... Also, I
wonder what the nearly 13 Megs of shared memory would be being used for.
Is there any way to find out more details about that?

I'm using 2.1.42 now, but the problem may be older than that. It's just
that I when using the 2.1.3x kernels the risk of SMP deadlocks caused
me to be extremely careful not to load the system more than absolutely
needed.

MCE

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