On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:16:11PM +0200, Vincent van Scherpenseel wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Since last week I'm having problems with processes getting Killed out of 
> nowhere on my NetBSD 1.6.2 machine. I searched the /var/log/messages log 
> and learnt that this is due to the machine running out of swap.
> 
> When I run 'top' it shows me this:
> Memory: 38M Act, 23M Inact, 1792K Wired, 5016K Exec, 25M File, 10M Free
> Swap: 256M Total, 256M Used, 336K Free
> 
> dmesg shows:
> total memory = 97904 KB
> avail memory = 87520 KB
> 
> There is 1 stick of 64mb SD-RAM in the machine and 1 stick of 32mb.
> Is my assumption right that the memory is most probably faulty?

Why would you assume bad memory? Since you're losing a bit between total
and avail?

Here's what I get:

total memory = 510 MB
avail memory = 495 MB

And I have a pair of 256 MB sticks in mine.

More likely, you're just running more than your system can use.  This
box used to run out of memory and lock up back when I only had 192MB
in it.  What kinds of things is the system doing when it runs out of
memory?

What are the top 5 or so memory using processes according to top when
sorted by size?

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org