Allocation failures

I'm managing an OpenMosix cluster, running kernel 2.4.26-om1 on  
Debian Sarge.  After the head node has been up for a couple of weeks  
I start seeing a lot of allocation failure messages in the kernel  
logs.  The situation eventually deteriorates to the point where the  
machine is unusable -- all attempts to launch processes end with fork  
reporting allocation failures.  The problem does not appear to be  
memory exhaustion; the machine has 4 GiB of RAM and never uses more  
than 100 megabytes or so of swap.

Has anyone else seen this problem?  Is this the infamous Linux 2.4.x  
'memory fragmentation' issue rearing its ugly head?  Is there a fix?


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