"Cannot allocate memory" while no process seems to be using up memory

Posted by omat on Super User See other posts from Super User or by omat
Published on 2012-07-10T14:31:06Z Indexed on 2012/07/10 15:18 UTC
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linux

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memory

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python

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amazon-ec2

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I am not competent on server issues, any help is much appreciated. When try to start a python/django shell on a linux box, I am getting OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory.

free -m seems to confirm I am out of memory:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           590        560         29          0          3         37
-/+ buffers/cache:        518         71
Swap:            0          0          0

But I cannot see what is eating up the memory with top or ps aux:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
    1 root      20   0 24336  908    0 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.68 init               
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd           
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:04.85 ksoftirqd/0

How can I identify the leak? Thanks.

BTW, I am not sure if it is relevant, but the machine I am talking about is an AWS EC2 instance with Ubuntu 12 running.

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