Our scenario is the following:
One web server runninng kernel 2.4.9-e-12(smp), it is used to host an Apache webserver with an integrated application server. The system has 2Gb of RAM and 2Gb of swap. The last day an strange thing happened. We tried to connect to our system using ssh and we canīt, after many attempts we could connect to the system and saw that we couldnīt connect because there was a lack of memory. Every proccess you tried to start failed and gave the following error message" fork failed: Canīt allocate memory (errno=12)".
The output of the free -k command showed that the swap space(there was only 5 Mb of free RAM) wasnīt being used and we donīt understand why. We have found a lot of similar cases of systems that couldnīt fork but were plenty of unused swap space so we thought we would find answers for this problem but we havenīt found any(although we have looked for one a lot).
We think that perhaps our freepages settings are too low( 1.6-4.5-7.4 Mb) and if we merge this low values with an excesive fragmented memory this could explain our memory squeeze problems. Some of us have proposed the theory that everytime a proccess is started it needs a little quantity of contiguous memory and that if the system canīt provide it to the process it dies before the fork is completed. Any idea about what can be happening here?
We have seen that kernel 2.4.9.e-24 seems to fix this kind of problems, what do you think?
Apart from kernel upgrading we want to change the values(freepages) that control the swapping but we have seen in redhat release-notes that these parameters shouldnīt been changed(although it seems more a microsoft disclaimer"You are a fool so please donīt do anything with your system" than a real warning because there arenīt reasons about how can it spoil your system).
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-AS-2.1-Manual/release-notes/RELEASE-NOTES-U1
Regards, Mario. Regards, Mario.
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