From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail191.messagelabs.com (mail191.messagelabs.com [216.82.242.19]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id B7A6F6B0047 for ; Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:01:06 -0500 (EST) Received: by fxm22 with SMTP id 22so118696fxm.6 for ; Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:01:49 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <201002261232.28686.elendil@planet.nl> References: <201002261232.28686.elendil@planet.nl> Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:01:49 +0200 Message-ID: <84144f021002260601o7ab345fer86b8bec12dbfc31e@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: Memory management woes - order 1 allocation failures From: Pekka Enberg Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Frans Pop Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Mel Gorman List-ID: On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Frans Pop wrote: > Attached a long series of order 1 (!) page allocation failures with .33-rc7 > on an arm NAS box (running Debian unstable). > > The first failure occurred while running aptitude (Debian package manager) > only ~20 minutes after booting the system, and I've seen that happen twice > before. > > The other failures were all 1.5 days later while rsyncing a lot of music > files (ogg/mp3) from another box to this one. > They occurred when I was trying to also do something in an SSH session. The > first ones from a simple 'sudo vi /etc/exports', some of the later ones > while creating a new SSH session from my laptop. > > As can be seen from the attached munin graph [1] the system has only 256 MB > memory, but that's quite normal for a simple NAS system. Only very little > of that was in use by apps; most was being used for cache. > The errors occurred in the area immediately above the "Thu 12:00" label, > where the cache increases dramatically. > > Isn't it a bit strange that cache claims so much memory that real processes > get into allocation failures? All of the failed allocations seem to be GFP_ATOMIC so it's not _that_ strange. Dunno if anything changed recently. What's the last known good kernel for you? -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org