Firefox and swap-space errors

oxleyk · 12-06-2005, 04:29 PM

Occasionally Firefox crashes and looking in dmesg, the last four lines are thus:

swap_pager: out of swap space
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
pid 66401 (firefox-bin), uid 1001, was killed: out of swap space
pid 72386 (firefox-bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)

I have 256M in swap space and according to GKrellm I have about 180M free.

Google turns up insufficient help. Has anyone else seen this? How do I go about solving this? What should I look at? Any suggestions?

Thanks

Kent

cnjohnson · 12-06-2005, 05:43 PM

How much RAM do you have compared to swap space? 1:1? 2:1? >2:1?

Cheers--
Charles

oxleyk · 12-06-2005, 07:58 PM

I have 128M RAM.

cnjohnson · 12-06-2005, 09:05 PM

If you can, run vmstat with, say 5 second intervals and say 120 times, (that would be vmstat 5 120), while vmstat is running, launch firefox and see of you can get it to crash. Post the output of vmstat (or google vmstat and interpret the output for yourself) for a little analysis.

Cheers--
Charles

oxleyk · 12-07-2005, 08:59 AM

OK, I'll try that. Thanks.

Kent

oxleyk · 12-08-2005, 08:52 AM

Still trying...

Wouldn't you know it? I've run vmstat several times and Firefox has yet to crash.

Kent

cnjohnson · 12-08-2005, 10:31 PM

It always works that way!

Cheers--
Charles