Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: 2.2.7 - brief net loss, message logged | Date | Wed, 12 May 1999 19:14:56 -0700 | From | cjohnson@kookie ... |
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> eth0: insufficient memory; nuking packet > Last message repeated ~6000 times
Assuming you aren't really out of memory/swap, you may be bumping into a problem we found under heavy 100bT load. We have a 2.0.34 kernel, and I'm not a linux expert, so feel free to be skeptical of the following.
Under heavy load the network layer can surge to consume all the available memory that the paging system has reserved. Since the page daemon runs as a kernel process, and the interrupt and protocol layers starve the scheduler, there is no way to free up more memory even if plenty of swap is available.
I fixed it by adding routines to reserve/free "physical" memory. Reserve boosts min_free_pages and friends so that physical resources will be available during interrupt surges when the pager can't run. Then I made a tweak to net/dev.c to reserve the memory necessary for the backlog queue.
Packets still fall on the floor under heavy load, but at least memory isn't exhausted.
I would post a patch, but I have no confidence that the 2.0.34 diff would have any use in any other universe.
Feel free to suggest other treatments.
Cheers, cj*
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