From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 13:30:28 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 13:30:09 -0400 Received: from vasquez.zip.com.au ([203.12.97.41]:33811 "EHLO vasquez.zip.com.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 13:30:04 -0400 Message-ID: <3B8BD508.47CCA66D@zip.com.au> Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 10:29:44 -0700 From: Andrew Morton X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.8-ac9 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk CC: Jannik Rasmussen , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19? In-Reply-To: <3B8BD0F8.7308F0C9@zip.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote: > > On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > Possibly, VM system changes have taken you over some threshold. > > Are you putting a lot of traffic through that machine? > > There's <= 2500 messages (sendmail - usually <5 concurrently) going > through per day, some 10.000 pop connections per day (mostly at working > hours). The server's got some 256 megs of RAM, and is doing some small > databases with postgresql and mysql in addition to the apache server. The > server does not have any problems with swapping, as the text below should > show. > > As far as I can see from linux/mm/swap.c, it shouldn't have anything to do > with freepages... Am I wrong? > > roy > > [root@server log]# free > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 257876 252976 4900 64120 65156 147368 > -/+ buffers/cache: 40452 217424 > Swap: 136512 268 136244 > Networking needs to allocate memory at interrupt time. This is referred to as "atomic allocation". The only way in which this can be successful is for the VM system to ensure that there is a pool of immediately-allocatable memory lying around. The 2.2 kernel uses the tunables in /proc/sys/vm/freepages to decide how large that pool should be. Machines which sustain a high network load commonly require more memory than the default freepages setting provides. People who encounter network Rx allocation failures with 2.2 kernels do report that increasing the freepages tunables fixes the problem. -