I have installed RHEL ES 3.0 on DELL 1750 with 1GB RAM. Also i have 2GB Swap. I have got "Qmail+Vmailmgr+Tcpserver+RBL+SpamAssassin +Relay-CTRL+Qmail-Scanner+Courier IMAP Guide+POP3S+SMTPS" installed alongwith standard mysql, php and apache on this server.

My server dies randomly, sometimes after few hours and sometimes after 2-3 days and has following line in "/var/log/messages".
kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 1059 (mysqld-max).

Before, i thought that this problem might be occuring due to "OOM killer" bug in kernel-2.4.21-4.0.3EL, when installed on RAID servers. But, even after updating the kernel to kernel-2.4.21-15.0.3EL, it does not seems to goaway.

Please advise if you have any idea??

Thanks n Regards
-Amit

1) add more RAM
2) add more SWAP space (man swapon)
3) monitor system - which program consumes all the RAM (man top) and why

Sounds like one of the applications you're using has a fairly severe memory leak. Linux will detect an OOM condition after all physical and swap memory are used and then it will try to be "helpful" by killing your largest process to make room.

If the system really is recognizing 1GB of physical and 2GB of swap, then something must be getting out of control to fill up that much RAM. You're going to need to monitor application memory usage closely until you can determine which apps are the offenders. The "fun" part will be fixing them

mod_perl applications are notorious for having horrible memory leaks. It may be that you have a custom web app running that uses mod_perl and gobbles up memory that it never frees.

Hi,

I am also using RHEL ES 3.0 on DELL 1750 with 1GB RAM. Also i have 2GB Swap and I am facing the same problem. I am using MySQL and apache on this server. It says "out of memory, killed httpd deamon after a week. I will aprreciate if someone can help me to fix this issue.

Thanks

These definitely sound like memory leak issues. Make periodic checks of your system to see which processes are consuming all of the memory.

update the kernel to the latest 2.4 stable or even go 2.6 as its fully stable right now. update all the primary packages that are running right now, like qmail and spamassasin apache likes to leak sometimes too. update perl and python to latest stable versions. We had similar issues with a setup that's close to what you are describing. after all the updates its been stable for the last few months.