Broken memory management on system with no swap

[David Schultz]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2003, Lucky Green wrote:
> There appears to be a memory management bug that affects systems without
> swap files. Processes are killed off due to the server being "out of
> swap space" even though top shows some 800MB of "inactive" memory
> available.

``Inactive'' just means that the page just hasn't been accessed
for a while and is a candidtate for replacement.  However, on a
system without swap, the system has nowhere to send the page if it
is dirty.  The only pages that can always be discarded and reused
are those in the ``Cache'' and ``Free'' categories.

So the bottom line is that you really are running out of memory.