[PLUG] Strange errors in log

[Elliott Mitchell]

>From: Josh Zeckser <barkingcorndog at comcast.net>
> Hey everybody! I have a machine here that I think is dying, but I really
> don't know what is wrong. I've been getting some strange stuff in
> /var/log/messages, but I can't tell what it means. I'm hoping someone
> here will have some idea. Log is as follows:

You might of noticed that it was a series of repeats of the same pattern?
In such cases what occurs early is most important, and what occurs last
is sometimes important. Pretty often the stuff in the middle is
unimportant. Sometimes the whole thing is important, but here where it is
pretty well identical throughout we only needed a slice near the top.


> Oct 15 01:02:51 TomServo postgres[1582]: [2-1] LOG:  terminating any
> other active server processes

This could be a triggering event, or it could be an unrelated event.
Either way, this is of note but it isn't the main thing.

> Oct 15 01:02:52 TomServo kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 9728
> (kclock.kss).
> Oct 15 01:02:52 TomServo kernel: oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x1d2

Exactly what it says. Notice that the first letters of "Out of Memory"
are "oom". Either you need more swap, or you need to remove things from
this system.

You've got memory overcommitting enabled (I believe this is the default
with 2.6). One or more processes are growing very large, so large that
you're exhausting all memory plus swap. With memory overcommitting, the
process already thinks it has a page allocated so the kernel can't give
it an error that it is out of memory.

So a very simple coping strategy, it simply kills whichever process tried
to allocate memory, another strategy is to simply randomly kill a
process. Definitely a bad thing, but it is either that or randomly
panic.

So, more swap, or remove something. I'm noticing the main thing being
killed were kdeinit processes. I also notice you have Postgress running.
If this is a desktop, then it is a good idea to whack Postgress, if this
is a server then KDE is a very good candidate for whacking.


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