From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Apr 19 13:52:21 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A1D837B401 for ; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 13:52:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from noisebox.cypherpunks.to (adsl-208-201-229-163.sonic.net [208.201.229.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C42D43F93 for ; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 13:52:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from shamrock@cypherpunks.to) Received: from VAIO650 (adsl-208-201-229-160.sonic.net [208.201.229.160]) (using TLSv1 with cipher RC4-MD5 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by noisebox.cypherpunks.to (Postfix) with ESMTP id 98EB410D for ; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 13:52:19 -0700 (PDT) From: "Lucky Green" To: Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 13:52:17 -0700 Message-ID: <000a01c306b5$9092c190$6601a8c0@VAIO650> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627 In-Reply-To: <3EA19BAA.C133A3DC@mindspring.com> X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 Importance: Normal Subject: RE: Broken memory management on system with no swap X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 20:52:21 -0000 Terry wrote: > Lucky Green wrote: > > There appears to be a memory management bug that affects systems > > without swap files. Processes are killed off due to the > server being > > "out of swap space" even though top shows some 800MB of "inactive" > > memory available. > > > > Apr 18 18:13:25 pakastelohi kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed > > This is generally an attempt to get a swap mapping for > backing store for the process. It could be that all your > "inactive" memory has been spoken for. I had been under the impression that inactive pages contained data that is no longer being used by a program, but is kept around in case the data may be needed again in the future. Is it not the case that inactive memory should be available to active processes if the processes require more memory? > > I suspect that for some reason memory listed as "inactive" > by top is > > not being correctly allocated to new processes when no swapfile is > > available, since the errors do not appear until memory listed as > > "free" has dropped to about 1.5-3k. > > If you had provided a traceback, I would guess that this > happened as a call from swap_pager_reserve(), as opposed to a > call from > swap_pager_strategy() or swap_pager_putpages(). This can > only happen if you are using an md device; are you using an > md device (ramdisk)? If so: cut it out, or make sure the > MD_RESERVE bit is not set. "device md" is compiled into the kernel, but to my knowledge I am not using any MD devices. Should I remove this entry from the kernel config file? --Lucky