[nylug-talk] RedHat AS4 and wacky out-of-memory behavior

[Kevin Mark]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 09:42:14PM -0400, Frank D. Greco wrote:
> I had dual-proc/dual-core X86 rack go bonkers on me the other 
> day.  For some reason, this box ran out of memory (it had about 8GB 
> of RAM and 8GB of swap).

That's not a low-end system to have issue like that.

> 
> In the past, I've had Linux go psychotic on me when there's a 
> low-memory condition.  This time scripts acted erratically, no-hupped 
> Java apps decided to page like crazy (and act funky, like repeatedly 
> connect to a messaging server) and processes were seemingly killed at random.

I have heard that in low-mem cond., the kernel can kill random processes
and will swap a log. What time frame did this occur? seconds, minutes,
hours, days? Sound like a memory leak. Do a run where you log memory
useage via say top every few minutes to see what is hogging the ram.

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