Re: Sundry repeating 2.0.x problems

Philip Blundell (pjb27@cam.ac.uk)
Mon, 29 Jul 1996 17:23:53 +0100 (BST)


On 27 Jul 1996, Steven L Baur wrote:

> I wish I knew what this meant (I didn't get them before 2.0.0, and
> they don't cause a crash, though sometimes a lot of interactive
> processes have to be killed before the machine resumes normal execution):
>
> Jul 3 12:35:29 deanna kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
> Jul 3 12:35:39 deanna kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
>
> Jul 20 02:32:06 deanna kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
> Jul 20 02:32:45 deanna last message repeated 4 times
> Jul 20 02:33:46 deanna last message repeated 6 times
>
> I have always observed this message with greater than 30MB of swap
> available according to `free'. It seems more likely to occur when I
> am running XEmacs 20beta (10MB binary) with the executable on an
> NFS-mounted disk and Netscape is also running. But with so much swap
> available, I don't get it.

"Couldn't get a free page" means that something (usually the network
layer) needed to grab a page of RAM, and there weren't any free.
Swapping can't happen at that stage, so you can have as much free swap as
you like and it won't help.

P.