Hi, On Sun, 2 Jan 2000, Rogier Maas wrote:
I found that my apache and sendmail weren't running anymore. After a short inspection of my syslog, I ran into these:
Jan 2 01:01:12 suse kernel: VM: killing process httpd Jan 2 01:01:36 suse kernel: VM: killing process httpd Jan 2 01:01:36 suse kernel: VM: killing process sendmail Jan 2 01:01:36 suse kernel: VM: killing process httpd
What is VM, and why did it kill httpd and sendmail?
I do run a logrotater of my httpd only (no sendmail logs). After the log-mailing, it sighups my httpd. But that occurs at 00:00, not an hour later...
VM stands for virtual memory. Your system was running low on memory and the kernel killed the offending processes to avoid an out of memory situation which could potentially freeze the machine. Here's a comment from Andrea Archangeli (one of our Kernel hackers who wrote this functionality) about this: <SNIP> Yes, they should add more RAM (or more swap) to their machines. The kernel it's not too restrictive but it's only enough secure (the official 2.2.13 kernel can also potentially soft-deadlock in the swapin path in such conditions, while the SuSE kernel survive :). It the task got killed while they had plenty of swap or RAM free that would be true. Please check this. Thanks. </SNIP> Hope that helps, LenZ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lenz Grimmer SuSE GmbH mailto:grimmer@suse.de Schanzaeckerstr. 10 http://www.suse.de/~grimmer 90443 Nuernberg, Germany -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/