Hall, Ken (GTI) wrote:
1) why we suddenly should have run out of virtual memory (if we did, because we never even got close to that before), and
Most probably because your application has sudden demand for anonymous memory. Your report indicates the processes are hanging in "malloc". Maybe an infinite loop containing a memory leak?
2) why it was reported in this way. Does anyone know if there's anything in the swap space management mechanism that would cause Linux to fail malloc if a single swap partition fills up?
Malloc fails when there is no more free memory except the emergency pool and no swap slots are free. Note that anonymous pages in memory may well occupy both a swap slot and a pysical page in swap cache at the same time.
Is there some kind of process affinity for paging to swap spaces?
No. If malloc fails, all swap slots are in use. cheers, Carsten ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
