[vortex] eth0: memory shortage

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Steven Timm wrote:

> We are using ganglia, as I said before there seems to be the most
> activity on this when nodes enter and exit, but there is a
> lot of nfs activity on shutdown and reboot as well.

Do you have applications that use a lot of memory ? Do the
applications do a lot of I/O therefore there's a lot ot memory used
for caching ?

I also use here the Red Hat kernels (via TaoLinux) on some cluster
nodes with 3Com cards and did not see any such problem. However, our
applications do a lot of parallel communication and not so much I/O
and also they are often using less than half of the available RAM, so
there's not so much memory presure.

Anyway, RHEL 3 Update 4 is now out and they seem to have fixed some 
bad memory handling behaviour in the -27 kernel. Could you try that 
and see if the problem appears again ?

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu at IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De