On Sunday 08 January 2006 11:59, Scott Leighton wrote:
On Sunday 08 January 2006 12:48 am, Anders Norrbring wrote:
0-order allocation failed
Some googling reveals that message means the kernel couldn't allocate even one page of memory. What's your memory situation on that box, how much swap space?
Some of the google results also mention reiserfs issues related to that message, but it is all pretty vague.
Hi Scott, Hi Anders... OK, if we're going the Google research route, I also did some searching out of curiosity and what I read indicated the same thing... the kernel starts shutting down processes to preserve itself when it is running out of memory. There were no runaway incremental PIDs being generated, so it seems reasonable to suspect the problem is related to a specific application and not the kernel or overall system health. Also, one of the original errors that you posted, Anders, pertained to "fast flush". AIUI, the mail server maintains a cache of addresses with pointers to mails that fail to deliver and are stored so sending can be attempted again repeatedly until either a "give it up" point is reached or the mail successfully sends. It looked like I was digging up situations with that error message where the cache and/or stored mails were growing too large and/or too quickly and/or failing to flush correctly... possibly DOS attack and/or spam related. Could be worthless fodder or clues, I don't know. I'm just hoping to be helpful by tossing it into your salad of things to sample... Good luck! - Carl PS: And Happy New Year!