processes probe is red - log shows error (0) Cannot allocate memory

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

The processes probe on a system has turned red and is no longer running.

The only message in the probe log is:

 Probe 'processes' FAILED to start (fork) (command = processes) error =  (0) Cannot allocate memory

Cause

The processes probe executes system commands like 'ps' or 'tasklist' to enumerate the processes on the system.

If the system is so low on memory that these commands cannot be executed, the probe will fail.

Resolution

As a workaround, set "retry_discovery_limit = 5"  (or another number of your choosing) in the <setup> section of the processes.cfg.

This key should already be present with a value of 1 as seen below - but if not, you may add it.

 

This causes the processes probe to retry the system commands more (e.g. 5) times, instead of failing immediately when the process list cannot be obtained.  We recommend 5 as a good starting point, but you could choose a higher number (e.g. 10) if setting it to 5 does not resolve the problem.

Additional Information

This issue has also been seen on systems running robot 9.38 which contains a known memory leak - in addition to the changes above, please upgrade any robots to 9.40 or higher.