System low on memory+swap shortage message

Matthew Dillon dillon at backplane.com
Tue Sep 8 10:35:43 PDT 2015


I did push some significant changes to the low-memory pageout and kill code
on August 20 to master.  I have MFC'd that to the release branch today
(September 8th) so try building a new kernel.  The fix deals with an edge
case that can occur when programs allocate large amounts of memory all at
once in excess of cache+free can cause the process killer to prematurely
activate.

-Matt

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 12:02 AM, YONETANI Tomokazu <y0n3t4n1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The wired pages stay at slightly less than 1.6G, but active and inactive
> keep growing until it starts killing some processes.  A silly workaround
> could be to run something as
> $ perl -e '$x="@";$x=$x x 1048576; $x x 1048576'
> so as the active count gets pushed back to something like 50M, which gives
> me a few to several days without OOM.
>
> Best Regards,
> YONETANI Tomokazu.
>
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 10:01:31AM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> > Continue monitoring the wired pages (from systat -vm 1) on your system
> with
> > the new kernel and see if those tick-up from day to day.
> >
> > -Matt
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 3:49 AM, YONETANI Tomokazu <y0n3t4n1 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 05:09:27PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> > > > There are numerous possibilities.  For example, tmpfs use.  You could
> > > check
> > > > if the wired page count has become excessive (could be an indication
> of a
> > > > leak).  There was a bug fix made in master related to a memory leak
> from
> > > > locked memory that was fixed on July 12 (a51ba7a69d2c5084f2 in
> master),
> > > you
> > > > could try cherry-picking that one into your local tree and see if it
> > > helps.
> > > >
> > > > You'll need to do some more investigation.  The most likely
> possibility
> > > is
> > > > tmpfs use.  The wired memory leak is a possibility too but depends
> on the
> > > > system workload.
> > >
> > > Thank you for the hints and cherry-picking the fix.  I updated the box
> > > with the new source this morning, and I'll come back with the new
> result
> > > later.
> > >
> > > On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:27:08PM +0800, Nuno Antunes wrote:
> > > > Any clue in vmstat -m ?
> > >
> > > On older kernel, it looked like this; mostly occupied by vfscache,
> > > then vnodes and HAMMER-inodes.  so I'm guessing either hammer cleanup,
> > > updating the locate db, or git pull may have increased the usage.
> > > tmpfs-related numbers were less than 100, on the other hand.
> > >
> > > $ sed -E 's/^(.{20})(.{7})(.*)$/\2&/' vmstat-m-before  |sort -nr |sed
> > > 's/^.......//' |head -n5
> > >            vfscache 881481  81743K      0K     764928K   1033104    0
>    0
> > >              vnodes 420508 170832K      0K  134203388K    420508    0
>    0
> > >       HAMMER-inodes 404482 353922K      0K  134203388K    416101    0
>    0
> > >       HAMMER-others   3994    720K      0K     764928K   3754450    0
>    0
> > >               devfs   3803    602K      0K     764928K      4382    0
>    0
> > >
> > >
> > > Best Regards,
> > > YONETANI Tomokazu.
> > >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/attachments/20150908/de90948a/attachment-0007.html>


More information about the Kernel mailing list