beefy system exhausted by MRTG port install (Cannot allocate memory)

[Eric Anderson]

On 02/20/07 11:44, Arone Silimantia wrote:
> --- Eric Anderson <anderson at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>>> after this attempt, swapinfo still shows zero swap
>> in use.
>>> What does this mean ?
>>>
>>> Is my system now in an unstable state ?  Should I
>> reboot ?
>>
>> Did you try reducing your maxdsiz to something a few
>> hundred mb's less?
> 
> 
> No - after the 'make install' stopped I have not
> touched anything.  As I said, swapinfo still shows
> zero swap being used.
> 
> It's a Big Deal (TM) to bring this system down, and I
> believe maxdsiz cannot be tuned on the fly with sysctl
> ... are you suggesting that either make or cc just
> gets out of hand and makes a process too big for
> themselves ?
> 
> If so, is it possible to tell make or cc to behave
> ahead of time, and leave maxdsiz alone ?


I don't know, but this seems to be a VM related issue (not issue as in 
bug).  I think you've probably allocated pretty much all your memory to 
user-space stuff, and not left enough for the system to function.  If 
you're on i386, and have all that set in maxdsiz, you're probably too 
close to the ceiling.  I would drop it by ~500MB or so just to be safe. 
  I'm absolutely no expert in this at all - I only suggested it because 
after tweaking my maxdsiz to a very large amount like you did (to allow 
for fsck), I successfully paniced my box on boot.  So, knowing that, I 
would drop it down a bit.

Eric