Re: Unable to load interpreter ???

[Stefan Boresch <stefan mdy univie ac at>]

> 
> I have seen this behaviour before.  If you have sustained heavy paging, your
> system's virtual memory completely runs out and then is reclaimed back to
> sensible amounts, in continuous oscillations.  You can watch this happen,
> although tools like vmstat and top don't last for more than a couple of
> hours under these extreme circumstances (I had a nice graph somewhere of vm
> cycles on what should have been a steady-state overnight test).  Attempting
> to run a shell when vm is near exhaustion produces the 'unable to load
> interpreter' message.
> 
> The kernel was the patched 2.0.35 (may have also happened on 2.1.122, can't
> remember).  The machines - LX and UX boards (don't have anything else to
> test).
> 

Hm, wait -- I accept this explanation of what is going on (my problems
occur after heavy paging has been going on for a while...).  However,
what can I do about it?  Are there patches/bugfixes whatever out there
that fix this?  I am positive that I am never using more memory than
the sum of RAM + swapspace (actually far from it).  The memory
tester is run in such a manner as to consume just a bit more memory than
there is RAM (mainly to make sure that every bit of RAM is actually
stressed).  Our real applications use much less memory than there is
RAM, but I guess because of the heavy disk I/O (virtual) memory gets 
used a lot for buffers/caching etc.

But if I understand this right, than I am looking at a memory management
bug, or not...?

Thanks,

Stefan Boresch