Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 19 Jun 1999 23:49:23 -0700 | From | Jay Thorne <> | Subject | Tracking down what looks like a memory leak in 2.3.x |
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This is very tentative, but it appears on extended run times, ie: 4 or 5 days with various X applications, I lose a substantial amount of RAM.
The symptom is this: After 4 days of running, switching windows in GNOME starts the disk going like its going into swap. No problem says I, I'll just kill the X server and start it again, that should free up a ton of RAM. Back into GNOME (I use gdm), and it looks fine. Start up Netscape again and it starts up very slowly with lots of disk activity.. So I alt tab back to gmc. Thats got the disk going like a mad thing again. So I completely kill gdm, X, and everything, start X again, and get thesame symptom. So I reboot. Then its fine. (System is Cyrix 166/64M/IDE/RH5.2w/updates Kernel 2.3.6)
I get home and now my home box (P200MMX/64M/IDE/RH5.2w/updates Kernel 2.3.4) is doing the same thing. SO I investigate further. I kill X and gdm and everything down to a nearly bare system. THen I run # perl -e 'open (FILE ,"/dev/hda"); while (<FILE>){ $mem.= $_;}' Just to fill up some memory and cause the swapper and kswapd to do their thing. It takes a couple minutes to do its thing, and runs up to my memory+swap size, but never gets more than 42 Mbytes (on a 64M system) resident set. Ok. I'm confused. It dies like I wanted it to, but the _used_ memory is still at 20 megs. I'm looking thru the process list and _all_ 20 of the remaining processes are at 0 to 48 kbytes resident. About 300 kybtes, total in the process list, 20megs used, 40 megs free, 1800 buff, 2000 cached.
So I reboot, and re-do the test. Then the process goes to 55 megs, and when it dies from out of memory, the used memory goes down to 4 megs. with 300 kbytes on the process list, and 56 megs free, and similar numbers for buffer and cache.
So. It looks like slow leak. But at the kernel level, since killing the processes doesnt seem to free the memory again. How can I look for the memory? Might it be shared memory areas left around by a bug in the gnome libraries?? How do you list shm areas?
-- Jay Thorne The Net Result System Services jay@result.com Http://net.result.com Zoom 505 Effect page http://net.result.com/~jay Zoom 5xx series Patch Database: http://net.result.com/~jay/db.html
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