[H-GEN] out of memory?!

[Sandra Milne]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
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At 16:47 16/06/2002 +1000, Greg Black wrote:
>[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
>[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
>Sandra Milne wrote:
>
>| I just had 4 ssh sessions to my gateway killed (not all at once, in a row).
>| I hooked up a monitor and found that there was only 6 meg of memory free!!!
>
>How do you know?  (This is a serious question -- it's very
>difficult to interpret "free memory" data provided by Unix
>systems, and I expect this is true of Unix-like systems.)

well, i typed 'free' at the console. Another clue was the half-dozen or so 
"Out of memory: process killed (bash)" messages on the screen after I 
plugged in a monitor.

>The box I'm writing this on claims to have only 1M of memory
>free at this minute, out of the 384M of real memory that it has.
>But it has only ever used 10M out of its 1G of swap in the 157
>days that it has been running.  If I start another 20 processes
>right now (on top of the 241 that are running), they will all
>start instantly and won't have the slightest idea that memory is
>tight.  That's because there is in fact no shortage of memory on
>this box.

Well, when the box can't deactivate the swap space and generates 
neverending "Out of memory: process killed (init)" errors, that would be 
another clue that something is seriously wrong.

>If gdm cannot run reliably, you'd be best to try a better
>program (xdm comes to mind).  And I'm surprised that you'd want
>to run either of those on a gateway ...

I was experimenting with running remote X sessions using a client on my 
machine. I have no idea how to make this work with xdm however, as the 
documentation that came with the client I was trying to use is somewhat on 
the light side. However I had thought I'd uninstalled gdm as I finished 
experimenting with it several weeks ago. I think the problem was caused by 
my having shut the process down and gotten distracted before I had a chance 
to uninstall it. Then I changed some hardware in the gateway on Friday 
night, and when the box came back up it attempted to run gdm as it was 
still listed in rc2.d

Sandra.

***---***---***---***---***---***---***
silne at optushome.com.au
ICQ: 7632763
http://members.optushome.com.au/silne
"Death is certain, life is optional"


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