Need info on swapping

[Stephen Ryan]

On Tue, 2002-09-03 at 15:53, Brenda Bell wrote: 
> 9/3/2002 15:26:42, Bob Bell <bobbell at zk3.dec.com> wrote:
> 
> >    According to this you aren't using *any* of your swap...
> 
> That's sort of what led to my original question... in a low memory situation, starting a second 
> instance of qmail generated an error ("cannot allocate memory" from libc.so.6).
> 
> At the time the error occurred, I had about 5Mb free real memory and 500Mb free swap 
> which led me to wonder whether a) there are certain things that can't be swapped or b) 
> something's wrong with my configuration that keeps it from swapping.  I suspect the former 
> is true so I was trying to get as much information as possible in order to optimize my 
> configuration.
> 
> Cheers,
>    Brenda

I just ran into a similar error; maybe you're out of shared memory? 
'ipcs' lists current shared memory segments and 'iprm' deletes unused
shared memory segments.  If ipcs lists a lot of shared memory segments,
you can delete all the ones that are currently unused (0 in the "nattch"
column).  

Just a guess,

-- 
Stephen Ryan                                        Debian GNU/Linux
Technology Coordinator
Center for Educational Outcomes
at Dartmouth College