Re: YIKES!!! A very scary thing happened today [2.2.13] Memory bug?

[Jesse Pollard]

[e-mail] (Lord Apollyon):
>I was just calming down but still rather perplexed when I typed "dmesg"
>just to see if the kernel barfed any messages about the process
>closures... and I saw the final clue which unravelled the puzzle:
>
>Out of memory for nmbd.
>
>Out of memory for klogd.
>
>Out of memory for atalkd.
>
>Out of memory for checkups.
>
>Out of memory for powerd.
>
>Out of memory for rpc.mountd.
>
>Out of memory for rpc.nfsd.
>
>Out of memory for tiff2bin.
>
>Aha!  tiff2bin is a utility I wrote to rapidly print faxes to HP Laserjet
>printers at extremely high speed by simply converting the tiff images to
>200x200 dpi [line doubling the low quality faxes], and then
>raster-compressing them using HP's FASST! algorithms.  It works great,
>however, the TIFF library is a bit of a bitch to deal with so I use the
>"read entire file into core" method.
>....

Your problem has been seen before - Out Of Memory  (virtual that is)

Currently there is no resource accounting (I blame it on this) that can
protect a system from a memory hog. The system allocates until no more is
available.

The NEXT process that asks for memory (not necessarily the pig) will get
a null pointer from malloc. This usually causes the process to terminate
(the "Out of memory for xxx messages usually preceed the exit).
Forks can also cause aborts (since the fork allocates memory for stack),
which can abort the parent process (telnetd, inetd, init (rarely), web
servers, etc).

In the short term - try adding more swap space.

IM(not so)HO: Linux needs better resource accounting. Perhaps it should
be called "controled resource allocation".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: [e-mail]

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.