Failed to fork. Cannot allocate memory

[seeds]

I get this message ever so often. "Failed to fork. Cannot allocate memory". When this happens I can't open any program. I have 6gigs of memory running sabayon 7 with gnome 3. Thanks for your help.

[Stupot]

Sounds like one of two things is happening.

Either some application has gone crazy and sucked up all your RAM, or one (or some) of your sticks of RAM aren't working properly.

I ran into a similar issue with my box when 2 sticks of RAM would sometimes work and sometimes just stop working. I had to scale back to using 2 GB instead of 4 GB to make my system stable.

[seeds]

k. could be that. the last time it happened i reloaded gnome shell and things became normal. i did run top but didn't see any particular program hogging all the memory though.