Re: ERROR: invalid memory alloc request size, and others

Jonathan Hedstrom wrote:
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 13:38, Jonathan Hedstrom wrote:
>>
>>> We recently upgraded from 8.1.4 to 8.2.0 on Fedora Core 6, and are now
>>> seeing a few rather ominous-looking messages.

[ SNIP ]

>> Also, schedule some maintenance window for your server to run memtest86
>> and possibly something to check for bad blocks on your drives.  Often
>> errors like the invalid memory alloc request size you're seeing, and the
>> link doesn't match one are caused by bad hardware.
>
> I'll try to run these tests soon, but this is a production server, so
> scheduling downtime takes a bit of planning. I should also mention that
> this is the exact same server we've been running 8.1.4 on for about 6
> months without a problem (doing the same nightly update causing the
> problem etc), so I'm a bit skeptical about having suddenly developed
> hardware issues.

Not having experienced any of the above issues myself, the following are
totally off-the-cuff:

You indicated you are now running Fedora Core 6, and that your previous
8.1.4 configuration was running for ~6 months prior to upgrading.  I
assume that because it is a production server, the FC 6 upgrade was
performed at the same time as the 8.2 upgrade.  You indicated that
you're running on the exact same hardware as before, so unless you
opened the machine, relocated it, etc. as part of the upgrade, hardware
issues would seem unlikely.

FC 6 brings a number of changes to the table -- the biggest one being
the 2.6.18 Linux kernel.  The 2.6.18 kernel updates were released for FC
5 in the middle of October, but as you are talking about a production
server, I would imagine you did not upgrade at that time.

Have you applied all current FC 6 updates?  I definitely recommend
making sure you are current with all updates.  A quick check shows that
FC 6 has released almost as many package updates as since its release as
FC 5 has since it was released (6 months more time).  I know there were
a number of issues that were queued up and released right after the FC 6
release, to avoid slipping the release date any further than it had
already slipped.

If you can't attribute the issues to any software problems, I would
definitely start looking at the hardware, as Scott & Tom suggested.  As
unlikely as hardware issues might seem, that seems to be the most
frequent time those little buggers manage to show their teeth :^)

Hope this helps...

Andrew