Out of Free Storage error

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

Charles C. Bennett, Jr. wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 CCBJ> type:

 CCBJ> free | mail -s "out of free storage error" discuss at blu.org

 CCBJ> and we'll all have a look at how much RAM you have and how
 CCBJ> much swap space you've allocated.

This may not be a good test.  If the swap space has become corrupt, which can
happen after a power failure or similar abrupt incident, then the swap space
would show under "free" but funny things could happen.

The first thing to do when trying to diagnose a problem of this kind is to boot
the system to single user mode, run "swapoff" to dismount all of the swap
areas, run "mkswap" to reorganize the swap space internal markers, run "sync"
to commit these changes to disk, and then reboot normally.  This is a very easy
procedure as long as you have at least 6 MB RAM so you can run with no swap to
do minimal things, but becomes an elaborate game of "musical chairs" on a
severely memory-constrained machine with less than 6 MB RAM.

Note also that Linux at present can only use a swap area up to 128 MB.  If you
swap onto a larger area, Linux will only use the first 128 MB.  If you need
more than this, you must provide multiple swap areas of no more than 128 MB
each.  However, anyone running into this particular limitation is unlikely to
be seeking advice in this forum.
 
-- Mike


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