Cached memory never gets released
There is some new information that might be useful. The cache memory lower limit seems to be going up by 1 or 2 megabytes whenever the kernel kills the XFree86 process:
Jun 23 11:20:16 __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) Jun 23 11:20:16 VM: killing process XFree86
Could it be when the kernel kills a process for trying to use up too much memory, the pages used by the process get left in some locked state so can never be reused?
This is the sort of behaviour we're seeing, it is very reproduceable.
Note this is kernel 2.4.23.
-Dave
Quoted 6 lines · David Ashley
There is some new information that might be useful. The cache memory lower limit seems to be going up by 1 or 2 megabytes whenever the kernel kills the XFree86 process:
Jun 23 11:20:16 __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) Jun 23 11:20:16 VM: killing process XFree86
Quoted 8 lines
Could it be when the kernel kills a process for trying to use up too much memory, the pages used by the process get left in some locked state so can never be reused?
This is the sort of behaviour we're seeing, it is very reproduceable.
Note this is kernel 2.4.23.
Have you tried a kernel that's less than 8 months old? 2.4.26 is current.
-Doug