* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> OTOH ... wait a minute. Have you maybe got the system configured to
> start denying memory requests before it gets into significant swapping?
> We typically suggest setting vm.overcommit_memory=2 on Linux, but
> I'm not sure whether that results in the kernel trying to avoid using
> swap at all. Maybe this really is an issue with system-wide total
> memory use rather than any one process.
Err, yea, overcommit_memory=2, a small amount of swap space, and a low
overcommit_ratio could cause this to happen... The default
ratio is 50 though, which should mean, on this system, there is about
10G available for user processes, but his usage shows only a bit over 2G
being used outside of buffers/caches (based on free output)..
Matt, can you provide the output from these:
cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio
cat /proc/meminfo
?
Thanks,
Stephen