out of memory error

[Christine Ross]

On 2 occasions (different days and times) I received this error in my logs

130407 21:40:48 [ERROR] Out of memory; check if mysqld or some other process uses all available memory; if not, you may have to use 'ulimit' to allow mysqld to use more memory or you can add more swap space


My 64bit Sparc Solaris 8 server has 8G of memory, I have 5G of swap and ulimit is unlimited. I'm running 32bit mysql v5.0.22. My connection is 1000 but this server hardly has any connections. I"m running innodb and some of the my.cnf settings are below.

# ulimit -a
time(seconds) unlimited
file(blocks) unlimited
data(kbytes) unlimited
stack(kbytes) 8192
coredump(blocks) unlimited
nofiles(descriptors) 8192
vmemory(kbytes) unlimited

key_buffer = 384M
sort_buffer_size = 2M
read_buffer_size = 2M
query_cache_size= 32M
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 384M
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 120


I do a top and mysqld is using about 4G of memory and it is not released until I restart mysql. Why would it not release the memory? How can I find out what query, etc, is running?


I read the great post from Rick James but I don't want to make changes until I see if I can find out why the memory is not being released.

Any suggestions please?

Thanks



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2013 12:30PM by Christine Ross.