page allocation failure - am I running out of memory?

Posted by mfriedman on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mfriedman
Published on 2011-02-16T12:43:26Z Indexed on 2012/06/19 3:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 526

Filed under:

linux

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memory

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Troubleshooting

Lately I've noticing entries like this one in the kern.log of one of my servers:

Feb 16 00:24:05 aramis kernel: swapper: page allocation failure. order:0, mode:0x20

This is what I'd like to know:

What exactly does that message mean?
Is my server running out of memory?

The swap usage is quite low (less than 10%), and so far I haven't noticed any processes being killed because of lack of memory.

Additional information:

The server is a Xen instance (DomU) running Debian 6.0
It has 512 MB of RAM and a 512 MB swap partition
CPU load inside the virtual machine shows an average of 0.25

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