Re: [PLUG] Why am I running out of memory?

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 06:07:36PM -0500, Tobias DiPasquale wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 15:00, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> > That happens 4 times, and then it aborts.
> > 
> > Anyone have any idea why I can't get to all that swap space?
> 
> The process is being killed by the OOM (out-of-memory) killer. When
> physical memory gets tight (since the kernel memory is not pageable) and
> the kernel cannot allocate memory, it will run the OOM killer to free up
> some memory. It kills the process currently running, which is invariably
> your matrix-manipulation program. You can't get into all that swap
> because the kernel runs out of memory before you get to use the
> remaining swap. Move to 2.6 or 2.4.23pre and you will not have that
> issue (the OOM killer is removed in these kernels).

http://linux-mm.org/docs/oom-killer.shtml says this happens when
*virtual* memory gets tight.  And I've got a TON of virtual memory.
And even so, why doesn't it just swap out some other part of my
process?

Walt

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