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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Machine becomes unresponsive when allocated large amounts of memory

  • Subject: Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Machine becomes unresponsive when allocated large amounts of memory
  • From: Martin Hicks <mort [ at ] bork [ dot ] org>
  • Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:30:42 -0500
On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 05:48:15PM -0500, Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:55:16PM -0800, tiller man wrote:
> 
> > And thats where the problem is. It doesn't fail in the call to
> > malloc()  or realloc(), it appears to continue running. However, the
> > machine locks up at this point.
> >
> > (Well so it would seem, I am not sure if it still running the
> > process at all, or just being extremely slow, as I only print out
> > debugging information every 1000 allocations or so).
> >
> > Now, I currently access this machine(AMD64 with 1GB of memory I
> > believe) through ssh, as it is not located directly at my workplace.
> 
> So presumably, you can't see the hard drive light?  Next time, ask
> your restarter-person what it's doing.  My standard guess for
> "system becomes unresponsive due to memory allocation" is that it's
> thrashing the swap.

Yes, this is almost certainly what its doing.  Starting "vmstat 1"
before you allocate more than physical memory will show you what's going
on.

2.4 does not deal well with using swap.  Full Stop.

mh

-- 
Martin Hicks || mort [ at ] bork [ dot ] org || PGP/GnuPG: 0x4C7F2BEE