Hi all,
today we've encountered quite strange issues with memory allocation on
one of our VPS running CentOS 6.2. So far I've been unable to determine
what's causing it - hopefully someone here will know what's up.
The VPS is a "small" machine - just 512MB of RAM, 1 CPU, running 6.2.
with current kernel (2.6.32-220.4.2.el6.x86_64, but I've tried the
2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 too). There's a quite common stack installed, i.e.
Nainstalov?n je na n?m celkem standardn? stack - apache, php,
postgresql, postfix, dovecot, memcached and ssh. Basically nothing
exotic, everything from official repos (except from postfix and
postgresql). The machine is not heavily used.
More detailed logs (than posted here) are available here:
http://pastebin.com/vYxRUyUX
We've been hitting some I/O utilization issues (cause by other VPS
instances on the same hw) so we've migrated to a different physical hw.
After the migration, the VPS started failing because of memory alloc
issues - the services fail either at startup time or when processing the
requests - although there's enough free mem:
[root at vps audit]# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 502728 294224 208504 0 18604 163608
-/+ buffers/cache: 112012 390716
Swap: 0 0 0
i.e. about 200 MB of free memory, but apache fails because of segfaults
when forking a child process:
[16:49:51 2012] [error] (12)Cannot allocate memory: fork: Unable to
fork new process
[16:51:17 2012] [notice] child pid 2577 exit signal Segmentation
fault (11)
or when processing requests:
[26 16:30:16 2012] [error] [client 66.249.72.1] PHP Fatal error: Out
of memory (allocated 262144) (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in
Unknown on line 0
The memory_limit in PHP is set to 32MB, so it's not the case. Similar
issues happen to PostgreSQL:
16:42:01 CET pid%04 db=xxxxxx-drupal user=xxxxxx FATAL: out of
memory
16:42:01 CET pid%04 db=xxxxxx-drupal user=xxxxxx DETAIL: Failed on
request of size 2488.
16:42:01 CET pid$38 db= user= LOG: could not fork new process for
connection: Nelze alokovat pam??
16:42:01 CET pid$38 db= user= 4f4a5247.986:21 LOG: could not fork
new process for connection: cannot allocate memory
I have absolutely no clue what's causing this / how to fix it. According
to free/vmstat there's about 200MB of free RAM all the time, so I have
no idea why the alloc calls fail.
What makes is even more puzzling is that after adding a swapfile, all
the issues suddenly disappear, although the swapfile is not used at all
... and it's not possible to disable it because of memory alloc.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=swap.img bs24 count@9600
# mkswap swap.img
# swapon swap.img
... now the services are starting fine ...
# swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/root/swap.img file 399992 0 -1
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 503412 294192 209220 0 11740 99980
-/+ buffers/cache: 182472 320940
Swap: 399992 0 399992
# swapoff swap.img
swapoff: swap.img: swapoff selhal: Nelze alokovat pam??
Any ideas what might cause this?
The fact that I haven't noticed these issues before the migration are
probably caused by a swap file - I've manually added it during a
maintenance and forgot to remove it after that, but it disappeared when
the machine was rebooted during migration.
There's a SELinux enable, but I doubt it's causing the issues - there's
nothing in audit logs except for an information that there was a
segfault. Nothing suspicious.
Otherwise it's just a standard CentOS install, the only thing I had to
tune a bit were kernel limits (in sysctl.conf) related to shared memory
(because of the database). Currently there's
kernel.shmmax = 68719476736
kernel.shmall = 134217728
vm.swappiness = 0
vm.overcommit_memory = 2
which should be fine IMHO ... any ideas?
regards
Tom??
