Help Center/ Elastic Cloud Server/ Troubleshooting/ Linux ECS Issues/ How Do I Handle the "page Allocation Failure" Error in a Linux ECS?
Updated on 2026-07-07 GMT+08:00
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How Do I Handle the "page Allocation Failure" Error in a Linux ECS?

Symptom

The error message "page allocation failure" is displayed in the dmesg or message log, as shown in the following figure. In this case, the system may be experiencing network disconnection, packet loss, or I/O exceptions.

Possible Causes

The "page allocation failure" error indicates that memory pages fail to be allocated. The common causes are as follows:

  • The memory usage of the ECS is high.
  • The memory usage of the ECS is lower than 80%, but the service I/O (network and storage) pressure is heavy. The network consumes memory faster than the system reclaims it.

Solution

Possible Cause

Solution

The memory usage of the ECS is high.

Upgrade the instance memory configuration by referring to Modifying ECS Specifications (vCPUs and Memory).

CAUTION:

During the modification, you need to stop and restart the ECS. You are advised to perform this operation during off-peak hours to reduce the impact on your services.

The memory usage of the ECS is lower than 80%, but the service I/O (network and storage) pressure is heavy. The network consumes memory faster than the system reclaims it.

Optimize the memory for high I/O scenarios:

You are advised to set vm.min_free_kbytes to three times the default value (67584 in most cases). The procedure is as follows:

  1. Run the following command to modify the kernel parameter: 
    echo "vm.min_free_kbytes=202752" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
  2. Run the following command for the configuration to take effect: 
    sysctl -p
CAUTION:

If the value of vm.min_free_kbytes is too large, the memory available to applications will be too small, which may trigger OOM issues. It is recommended that the value of this parameter be less than or equal to 3% of the total memory.
Parent topic: Linux ECS Issues