Hello Ben,
I saw you question below on the redhat-list: ----
* /Subject/: fork failed cannot allocate memory * /Date/: Mon Feb 23 14:42:00 2004
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I have a Dell 2650, dual Xeon box, 2GB RAM, 6GB swap with PERC Hardware RAID card. It was running RedHat AS2.1 with the 2.4.9-e.27smp kernel.
Other than the kernel version, the box was fully up2date with patches.
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We are experiencing the same problem on a HP Proliant DL580 server with dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors, 10Gb of memory and 6Gb of swap. We are using the 2.4.9-e.27enterprise kernel. We have the problem that every 1.5 week the system 'hangs' and we cannot log in anymore. In the logs I see messages as 'cannot fork: cannot allocate memory'. I made some scripts to monitor the status, but don't see any problems, there is about 4Gb of memory free at the time the system 'hangs'. Strange thing is that we have a couple of other DL580's running with the same configuration, but they don't have (yet) this problem. I was wondering, did your problems go away when you upgraded the kernel to 2.4.9-e38?
Regards, Lucas
We did upgrade the kernel and the problems have gone away. However we do not know if it was the kernel or another change that we made at the same time.
We had discovered that every time a crash had happened it was also the same exact time that a large SCP process (rsync -e ssh) was running over a gigabit ethernet link.
We changed the time that the scheduled rsync job was occuring and the "fork/crash" time followed the SCP job.
We have multiple server systems in a cluster, although they synchronize data all the time, the client machines hit the primary server unless it is down.
We moved the rsync job to the backup server in the cluster at the same time we upgraded the kernel.
The crash problem hasn't recurred since, but it might have recurred if we had left the rsync job on the primary.
Sorry, -Ben.
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