Low memory performance in 2.1.126?

Peter Hawkins (dph-man@iname.com)
Sat, 31 Oct 1998 17:06:52 +1100


Hi there...

I know this issue has come up before, but I've had a problem with kernel
v2.1.126 under low memory conditions.

Specs: PII-266 with 64m of RAM. 32m swap partition.
Kernel version 2.1.126 (accidently compiled SMP on a UP machine).

I had a bunch of apps open. Xfree86, netscape, gnome panel, gnome
terminal, and after about 5 hours, the computer ran out of memory ( i
presume, i couldn't tell.). I suspect the culprit here was a memory leak
in one of the gnome apps, but that's not relevant.

The symptoms were as I was browsing in netscape, the hard disk suddenly
began to thrash. I left it for about 30 seconds in the hope it might
stop, but it just kept thrashing. So I switched virtual consoles to a
text console and ran 'top' to find out what to kill. top returned an
insufficient memory error. I then switched to another 2 virtual consoles
and closed the unused shells running there, but with each I got a
message 'Unable to load interpreter'. I then switched back to X in the
hope I could close some X apps, but the computer froze at around this
point. The magic sysrq key let me sync and reboot, but basically the
system was left unusable by running out of memory.

Would it be possible to handle a low memory condition more gracefully?
Killing the process which is using the most memory could be a good
start.

Thanks,
Peter

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