I've been having this problem with MySQL. It dies repeatedly claiming to be out of memory. I've been monitoring memory usage on my linode and it usually dies while there is still large amounts of mem available. Additionally, as it is setup to automatically restart the server when it dies, it reaches a point that restarts no longer appear to work and a full reboot has been required to get the server up and running again.

I've had several people run through the configs to see if I had something wrong, no such luck. Also, my server is not hit very hard at all. It's mainly used for some backend work in holding information for the generation of static pages.

Has anyone else had a similiar problem or any ideas?

I'm running 4.0.16-standard and I've had the same problem with 4.0.15-standard.

Based on this page:

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Server_parameters.html

You might want to try something like this for low-memory conditions:

mysqld_safe -O key_buffer=8M -O sort_buffer=512k &

Maybe mysql tries to lock physical memory for it's buffers?

-Chris

Thanks. . . it looks like that might have fixed it. . .