Memory problems

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 6:36 AM +0200 5/12/02, Christian Gross wrote:
>THanks for your help.  Everything worked as stated (except you need
>/sbin/mkswap, but that is a minor detail).

Heh.  I always put /sbin in my $PATH, and forgot that by default it 
isn't there.

>However it still did not solve anything.  I already had a swap area and
>expanded it to about 600MB.  I am wondering if there is something in the
>YDL 2.2 memory allocation or something like that that is causing things
>not to work.  Meaning that this a problem within the java runtime.

It could be.  Since increasing swap didn't help, you might want to 
run a top session in a window and watch it to see whether the system 
really even goes deeply into swap before your program gets the out of 
memory error.  If the system isn't even swapping, the only reason you 
saw all but ~2MB of RAM used is the Linux kernel disk cache, which 
will opportunistically use almost all your free RAM (and give it up 
as needed).

>One quick question.  I would like to test a theory, but I was wondering how
>to I stop X.  I keep trying to kill it and it just restarts.  I am thinking
>that maybe X is taking too much memory and just see if java runs at all.
>What do I need to do?

Ah, you are booting with graphical login (xdm or kdm or some such). 
In this mode, the X server is automatically restarted by init if it 
dies, because it's essential for logging in.  You need to change to 
text (console) login to get rid of that behavior.

It's really easy to do: edit /etc/inittab.  There will be a line near 
the top that will look like this:

id:5:initdefault:

This sets your default runlevel to 5.  Change the 5 to a 3 and you're 
set.  Reboot the computer and you'll be able to login without X to 
test java.

-- 
Tim Seufert