VM: killing process - How to identify the problem

["Mudeem Siddiqui" <mudeem@quartics.com>]

Hi all, 

I have linux 2.4.25 on a mips processor. Other than my application, the
other processes that are running on the system are udhcpd, dhcpd,
mini_dns etc. The applicaiton is quite memory intensive, it has
allocated 5 MB of a buffer which acts as a queue and the applicaiton
queues and de-queues packets in the queue at frequents intervals. The
memory for this buffer is allocated just once when the application
starts at the time of boot. So I would assume that there would be quite
a lot of paging going on. 

The issue is that randomly the application gets killed, there is no
segmnetation fault or anything and if I look at /var/log/messages I see
quite a lot of 

__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed 
__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed 
__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed 


and then 

VM: killing process 

I have read that the application can be killed if the kernel is not able
to service the paging request or oom-killer can also kill the process.
How can I confirm that one of these is happening? I want to identify the
root cause of the application crash before experimenting like increasing
the swap space or even disable the oom-killer (i don't know if that
would be a good idea though). Any suggestions 

Thanks 
Mudeem