A post almost after 2 years!!! One common question I get asked is, "what is the reference I follow for troubleshooting an issue at hand". I would not be able to give an answer to the question directly as most of the times, I won't have even a single reference material handy. It's not a self boasting article. It's an article describing how knowledge we gather at random places help during an issue. Let's dissect a memory usage issue in Linux I faced recently and see how the triage shaped up. One of our processes was getting repeated ENOMEM when it was trying to call malloc for some reason despite the box had plenty of unused RAM. Lets see how the triage went through I didn't understand in my Operating systems course what a virtual memory is. I did convincing myself that virtual memory is physical memory + swap(in a way correct but not completely) I attended an interview in 2013, where the Director of the division asked me when you do malloc do you get physi