Memory leakage Error Message: Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory)
rin67630 opened this issue · 2 comments
Systems used:
Raspberry Pi Zero W (512 MB) running current version of Raspbian Buster (headless via VNC cloud).
That error showed up on many of my systems and is at least after some time reproducible.
After a couple of weeks running, the system becomes unreactive to any launch command from the panel. That includes Terminal and Shutdown/Reboot.
On any attempt to launch a new window I get
"Error Message Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory) "
Since the system is not physically accessible, no way to reboot.
No way to SSL either since the system is behind a NAT with no open SSL ports.
Finally I found some interesting information and a way to unlock the situation:
VNC can send the keyb. combination ALT-SHIFT-DEL, which on Raspbian starts the Task Manager.
That worked.
With it I found that LXpanel did eat 210MB of memory!
Far much than any other process! The cache was full filled up...
It really looks like LXpanel has got a memory leakage.
It would have been a bad idea to kill that process: I would not have been able to launch anything, and could not reboot either.
Serendipitously, I found a workaround: I changed a LXpanel setting from "left" to "top" and...
bingo!
LXpanel shrinked to 20MB and became responsive again.
So I have a got workaround and my problem is solved for the time being, but you might want to address the very cause.
Maybe my observations could bring you to find the memory leakage?
If you need additional information I could built another system at home, from which I could give you a SSL access to investigate?
Regards
I have got a feedback from another user using LXDE on X86.
He notices also a memory leakage after a few weeks without reset.
I have found a growing memory usage for LXpanel on all my Raspbian systems.