I've got a box with 4GB of RAM that I've driven into oom (so much so that e1000 can't alloc a single page, so I can't even ping it). But over serial console I noticed this.. [158831.710001] DMA32 free:1624kB min:6880kB low:8600kB high:10320kB active_anon:407004kB inactive_anon:799300kB active_file:516kB inactive_file:6644kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:3127220kB managed:3043108kB mlocked:0kB dirty:6680kB writeback:64kB mapped:31544kB shmem:1146792kB slab_reclaimable:46812kB slab_unreclaimable:388364kB kernel_stack:2288kB pagetables:2076kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB free_pcp:0kB local_pcp:0kB free_cma:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:70152496980 all_unreclaimable? yes How come that 'pages_scanned' number is greater than the number of pages in the system ? Does kswapd iterate over the same pages a number of times each time the page allocator fails ? I've managed to hit this a couple times this week, where the oom killer kicks in, kills some processes, but then the machine goes into a death spiral of looping in the page allocator. Once that begins, it never tries to oom kill again, just hours of page allocation failure messages. Dave -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>