That sounds a bit excessive?


Begin forwarded message:

Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:03:31 +0100
From: Peter Kruse <pk@q-leap.com>
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: I have a blaze of 353 page allocation failures, all alike


Hello,

today one of our servers went berserk and produced literally 353
page allocation failures in 7 minutes until it was reset
(sysrq was still working).  I attach one of them as an example.
The failures happened for different processes ranging from
sshd, top, java, tclsh, ypserv, smbd, portmap, kswapd to Xvnc4.
I already reported about an incidence with this server here:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/1/19/145
we have set vm.min_free_kbytes = 2097152 but the problem
obviously did not go away.
All traces start with one of these three beginnings:

Call Trace:
  <IRQ>  [<ffffffff81071f46>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x5ca/0x600
  [<ffffffff81344127>] ? skb_dma_map+0xd2/0x23f

Call Trace:
  <IRQ>  [<ffffffff81071f46>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x5ca/0x600
  [<ffffffff8109428b>] kmem_getpages+0x5c/0x127

Call Trace:
  <IRQ>  [<ffffffff81071f46>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x5ca/0x600
  [<ffffffffa01418fd>] ? tcp_packet+0xc87/0xcb2 [nf_conntrack]

Please anybody, what is the cause of these failures?

Thanks,

   Peter