"Cannot allocate memory" while no process seems to be using up memory
- by omat
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.