Trying to dd a 1G file in a Debian VE on a Debian HN causes the above error, and then the VE cannot be successfully restarted.
Background:
Kernel is official Debian Etch + openvz. Guests are two Debian minimals (vanilla, no change). HN has 512MB RAM.
I try to create a large file:
root@oneoneoneoneoneone:/# time dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zero bs=1024k count=1000
dd: writing `//zero': Disk quota exceeded
818+0 records in
817+0 records out
857153536 bytes (857 MB) copied, 14.4335 seconds, 59.4 MB/s
This fills the disk quota (no big deal). Second time I get my error:
root@oneoneoneoneoneone:/# time dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zero bs=1024k count=1000
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
root@oneoneoneoneoneone:/# free -m
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
root@oneoneoneoneoneone:/# logout
exited from VPS 111111
I deleted the zero file and even increased the disk quota, on the long shot that this was related to exceeding the disk quota. Did not fix.
I cannot restart the VE:
tony@sodium:/proc/bc/111111$ sudo vzctl restart 111111
Restarting VPS
Stopping VPS ...
VPS was stopped
vps-net_del WARNING: Function proxy_arp for eth0 is set to 0. Enable with 'sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.proxy_arp=1'. See /usr/share/doc/vzctl/README.Debian.
VPS is unmounted
Starting VPS ...
VPS is mounted
Unable to fork: Cannot allocate memory
Not enough resources to start environment
VPS start failed
VPS is unmounted
I have enough free memory (or so it appears):
tony@sodium:/proc/bc/111111$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 502 147 355 0 3 112
-/+ buffers/cache: 31 471
Swap: 2047 0 2047
I haven't yet restarted the server. I'd like to try and recover from this broken situation first.
Any clues?
Tony