ld.so.1 fatal: can't set protection on segment

Cause

Applications have recently begun to fail with this error, ld.so.1 fatal: can't set protection on segment. The failures are random.

Action

This was happening because of the recent introduction of a rogue application that consumed most of the swap space on the system. The other applications, which failed randomly, were doing so because of having insufficient swap space to run. The error from ld.so.1 occurred because there was no segment on which to set the protections.