[Novalug] process is getting killed without a log message

Peter Larsen plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com
Thu Sep 18 16:16:15 EDT 2008


First off, how do you know it's killed?  Couldn't it simply have been
terminated?
With 64MB RAM you're cutting things a bit close depending on what you
run. With Linux's kernel, when the computer runs out of virtual memory
it will randomly kill the process that takes the most memory (OOM = Out
of Memory). This is a kernel level message and WILL on a default system
be reported directly on the console and dmesg. Again, this depends on
your setup - you can get kernel messages turned off if you want. 

You also have several oom parameters on the kernel where you can control
the exact behavior:

vm.panic_on_oom 
vm.oom_kill_allocating_task
vm.oom_dump_tasks
vm.would_have_oomkilled

It could, however, be a ton of different things. But if things run fine
for a month and then it starts having problems, it definitely sounds
like a slow memory leak. Run "sysstat" or similar packages to tools to
trace the resource allocation over time (sar is a great command for
that). It should help you see if there's an evolving problem.  It
definitely sounds like you have a syslog problem if you don't see
anything in the logs - or maybe the process is supposed to stop - or
stops because of a software problem. No messages anywhere certainly
would be an indication that it's a software issue, in which case you'll
need to strace your way on the process and see what's going on (it will
tell you if something else is killing it).

If you're cutting it close on ram, and cannot add more physical try
adding a bigger swapfile for now. 

-- 
Peter Larsen <plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com>


-----Original Message-----
From: Sugi Durai <shiflinux@gmail.com>
To: novalug@calypso.tux.org
Subject: [Novalug] process is getting killed without a log message
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:26:43 -0400

Iam running a 2.4.32 version of the linux kernel in our linux box
which has 64MB RAM. All the process started during initial boot are
working fine for a month or so..after which Iam noticing that a
process is getting killed without any log message. On different linux
boxes running the same software over a period of one month the same
process was killed. But I now observe that a random process is getting
killed without any log message. "dmesg" also does not give any log
regarding the process getting killed.Can you suggest the reasons that
are possible for this kind of behaviour. If you want more information
on this I would be happy to give.
 
any input would be highly appreciated


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