linux-kernel - Memory management woes - order 1 allocation failures

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Message-Id: <201002261232.28686.elendil@planet.nl>
Date:	Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:32:28 +0100
From:	Frans Pop <elendil@...net.nl>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Cc:	linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Memory management woes - order 1 allocation failures

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?

Cheers,
FJP

[1] munin was running in the background and may well have contributed to 
some of the allocation failures. During most of the rsync it was the only 
significant other process running. But munin was not yet installed when 
the first allocation failure (for aptitude) occurred.

Download attachment "thorin.fjphome.nl-memory-day.png" of type "image/png" (35228 bytes)

View attachment "kern.log" of type "text/x-log" (144646 bytes)

View attachment "config-2.6.33-rc7" of type "text/plain" (51762 bytes)