RAM full

[nitinkgoud]

Hello,
I was trying to logon to console of one of my servers. But i could not, i was get errors pertaining to RAM being compleately used up. I did get the login prompt after about 15 mins.I was talking to my senior and he told me the system could not fork any new processes hence i was unable to login. Is there any way to handel these situations, or is painfully waitng the only solution.

BTW: This was this is a production box and cold reboot is not a posibility!

 

[marrow]

If you run vmstat 2 10
it will show the lack of memory with high values in the run queues (first 3 columns). What system do you have and how much memory and / or temp space? Adding more temp space could also help.

Post your results here so we can view.

 

[Annihilannic]

Painfully waiting is just about the only solution, unless you leave a root console session open somewhere all the time, which would at least give you the option of killing some processes. Even that can be difficult sometimes, because just running ps to see which processes to kill can be impossible if there is not enough memory to fork the ps process.

It is also a security risk however, so the console would need to be in a safe location.

Annihilannic.

 

[daFranze]

there is more or less no way to fix the problem, whenever the RAM is used. We are facing some similar problems on our test environment and the only thing I can do is to twirl my thumbs, wait and buy some more hardware (which I don't get for my testenv ;-) )

On our production env we have another strategy: we are monitoring the resources with hp openview. In case of a bottleneck we can shutdown applications or switch them to another host.

Best Regards, Franz
--
UNIX System Manager from Munich, Germany

 

[nitinkgoud]

Here is the deal.
Our HP-OV licences have expired and we dont have any monitoring in place.
Thanks guys.

 

[daFranze]

at my last job we used nagios as a monitoring utility. In my eyes it is even more efficient

Best Regards, Franz
--
UNIX System Manager from Munich, Germany

 

[AnotherAlan]

You could also use Big Brother. This is free, easily configurable and does the job.