Troubleshooting OpenVZ Out of Memory and Could Not Allocate Memory Errors

I will sometimes run into an error inside an OpenVZ guest where the system complains about running out of memory. This is usually seen as a message containing “Cannot allocate memory”. It may even occur when trying to enter into the container

[root@host ~]# vzctl enter 908
entered into CT 908
-bash: /root/.bash_profile: Cannot allocate memory

This particular error can be difficult to troubleshoot because OpenVZ has so many different limits. The “Cannot allocate Memory” error is a pretty generic error, so Googling it doesn’t necessarily yield any useful results.

I’ve found that the best way to track down the source of the problem is to examine the /proc/user_beancounter statistics on the host server. The far right column is labeled ‘failcnt’ and is a simple counter for the number of times that particular resource has been exhausted. Any non-zero numbers in that column may indicate a problem. In this example, you can see that the dcachesize parameter is too small and should be increased

[root@host ~]# cat /proc/user_beancounters
Version: 2.5
       uid  resource                     held              maxheld              barrier                limit              failcnt
      908:  kmemsize                  5170890              5776435             43118100             44370492                    0
            lockedpages                     0                    0                  256                  256                    0
            privvmpages                 53561                55089              1048576              1048576                    0
            shmpages                        2                    2                21504                21504                    0
            dummy                           0                    0                    0                    0                    0
            numproc                        30                   38                 2000                 2000                    0
            physpages                    6136                 7392                    0  9223372036854775807                    0
            vmguarpages                     0                    0                65536                65536                    0
            oomguarpages                 6136                 7392                26112  9223372036854775807                    0
            numtcpsock                      8                    8                  360                  360                    0
            numflock                        5                    6                  380                  420                    0
            numpty                          0                    1                   16                   16                    0
            numsiginfo                      0                    2                  256                  256                    0
            tcpsndbuf                  140032                    0             10321920             16220160                    0
            tcprcvbuf                  131072                    0              1720320              2703360                    0
            othersockbuf               151320               156864              4504320             16777216                    0
            dgramrcvbuf                     0                 8472               262144               262144                    0
            numothersock                  107                  109                 5000                 5000                    0
            dcachesize                3408570              3413265              3409920              3624960                   81
            numfile                       724                  957                18624                18624                    0
            dummy                           0                    0                    0                    0                    0
            dummy                           0                    0                    0                    0                    0
            dummy                           0                    0                    0                    0                    0
            numiptent                      10                   10                  128                  128                    0

You can do a little investigation to see what each particular limit does. I will usually not dig too deep, but just double the value and try again. You can set a new value using the vzctl command like this:

[root@host ~] vzctl set 908 --dcachesize=6819840:7249920 --save