page allocation failure - am I running out of memory?

Posted by mfriedman on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mfriedman
Published on 2011-02-16T12:43:26Z Indexed on 2012/06/19 3:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 473

Filed under:

linux

|

memory

|

Troubleshooting

Lately I've noticing entries like this one in the kern.log of one of my servers:

Feb 16 00:24:05 aramis kernel: swapper: page allocation failure. order:0, mode:0x20

This is what I'd like to know:

What exactly does that message mean?
Is my server running out of memory?

The swap usage is quite low (less than 10%), and so far I haven't noticed any processes being killed because of lack of memory.

Additional information:

The server is a Xen instance (DomU) running Debian 6.0
It has 512 MB of RAM and a 512 MB swap partition
CPU load inside the virtual machine shows an average of 0.25

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about linux

apt-get install and update fail

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I've got a problem with apt-get update and apt-get install ... commands . every time update or installing fails and errors are : Get:1 http://dl.google.com stable Release.gpg [198B] Ign http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable/main Translation-en_US Get:2 http://dl… >>> More
kernel module compiling error

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
sh@ubuntu:/home/ccpp/helloworld$ make gcc-4.6 -O2 -DMODULE -D_KERNEL_ -W -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -isystem /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include -c -o hello-1.o hello-1.c hello-1.c:4:0: warning: "MODULE" redefined [enabled by default] <command-line>:0:0: note: this is… >>> More
Build-Essentials installation failing

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I am having trouble accessing the several critical header files that show to be a part of the build process. The "Ubuntu Software Center" shows "Build Essentials" as installed: Next I did the following two commands, which did not improve the problem: ~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential [sudo]… >>> More
Updating Debian kernel

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I'm trying to update my Debian machine to 2.6.32-46 (which is the new stable). However, after doing apt-get update my apt-cache search linux-image shows me: linux-headers-2.6.32-5-486 - Header files for Linux 2.6.32-5-486 linux-headers-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem - Header files for Linux 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem linux-headers-2… >>> More
Serial connection over a single USB cable (Windows to linux, or linux to linux)

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I'm helping out with a project for an embedded device that only has USB and no serial. This device is running Linux. These days, when we need to connect to a serial port on a device we typically use a USB to serial adapter (on something like a phone system or a load balancing device, etc). I would… >>> More

Related posts about memory

SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 2

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
Part 1 of this series was an introduction and overview of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. This part looks at SQL Server memory management and how the SQL engine responds to changing OS memory conditions. Part 2: SQL Server Memory Management As with any Windows process, sqlserver.exe has a virtual… >>> More
SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory - Part 1

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
SQL and Dynamic Memory Blog Post Series Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 that allows the memory assigned to guest virtual machines to vary according to demand. Using this feature with SQL Server is supported, but how well does it work in… >>> More
SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory - Part 1

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
SQL and Dynamic Memory Blog Post Series Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 that allows the memory assigned to guest virtual machines to vary according to demand. Using this feature with SQL Server is supported, but how well does it work in… >>> More
Python Memory leak - Solved, but still puzzled

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Dear everyone, I have successfully debugged my own memory leak problems. However, I have noticed some very strange occurence. for fid, fv in freqDic.iteritems(): outf.write(fid+"\t") #ID for i, term in enumerate(domain): #Vector tfidf = self.tf(term… >>> More
SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 3

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
In parts 1 and 2 of this series we looked at the basics of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server memory management. In this part Serdar looks at configuration guidelines for SQL Server memory management. Part 3: Configuration Guidelines for Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server Now that… >>> More