Re: fork: out of memory

David E. Fox (dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com)
Mon, 24 Nov 1997 19:47:49 -0800 (PST)


> My work machine (a fresh RH 4.2 install with vanilla 2.1.65 added)
> exhibited the 'out of memory, can't fork' behaviour on Friday. I have 32M
> RAM and 80M swap and I had just installed the K desktop and the standalone
> netscape communicator 4.04 ... I had a couple of terminals open (plus

Here, after getting the cannot fork: messages about three or four
times since booting (a little over two days with 2.1.65) they haven't
locked up the system. In one case, it caused a Makefile (building
gimp at the time) to abort, but I was able to rerun it from basically
where it left off.

In other instances, these haven't adversely affected the system. One
was (as I reported) sent back to root in a crontab message, and the
other I briefly saw 'sendmail: cannot fork out of memory' on my
root console screen.

I've got a P100 with 16 megs of RAM and ~64 megs of swap.

> Rik: if you are reading this, kswapd was chomping 99% CPU and I wasn't
> trying to do much aside from start netscape. I could watch it paint

I didn't notice that, but I'll look into it. At the time, netscape wasn't
running, but I did have one or two xterms up, compiling in one window,
grabbing news in the other, etc.

> --Craig

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