Category: General (Page 6 of 26)

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

You can use the special $RANDOM environment variable to get a random number and divide it by the maximum number of seconds that you want to wait. Use the remainder as the number of seconds to sleep since it will always be between zero and the max you specified. This example will sleep anywhere between zero and 10 minutes (600 seconds)

 /bin/sleep/sleep   `/usr/bin/expr $RANDOM % 600`

Purists will note that it isn’t truly random. The maximum value for $RANDOM is 32767 which is not evenly divisible by most likely values, but it is close enough.