Possible serious bug in glibc, assistance needed
Hi, I've asked around on #debian, and was advised to mail you and make
sure it's glibc problem. I will describe problems I'm experiencing, and
then explain why I suspect glibc.
About 6 months ago I upgraded Woody -> Sid. I'm using GNOME as my
primary desktop, so did 1.4 -> 2.2 upgrade. Since then I've noticed
serious problems with memory usage - ie. when session starts, everything
runs fine, but after running for a while, RAM usage starts to increase,
and grows constantly. Swap is used too, and after few hours system
begins to slow down. Occupied memory size increases and after ~12 hours
it reaches about 90% / 100% (RAM / swap). At this point Out of Memory
errors begin to occur, killing the heaviest apps. Memory increase still
grows, ander after a while it's near 100% w/o any particularly heavy
apps running. Additionally, sometimes disk is used heavily, even w/o
apparent reason (i.e. on beginning of GNOME session it sometimes does
10MB/s for several minutes), I suspect it's swapping intensively, b/c
kswapd process is active. It freezes whole system, virtually preventing
any application start until disk transfer drops. Also, when mem usage is
high, there are frequent freezes during disk access, i.e music playback
stops for a moment during compilation and so on. Killing X session
causes occupied memory to be freed, but then the problem repeats.
There is a set of applications especially sensitive to that problems,
that is:
- Galeon (often reaches 80-100MB in memory usage)
- Python (bittorrent-gui can use even 130MB, gDesklets are clearly
unusable b/c of that)
- Pan news reader (jumps from initial 16MB as shown by Gnome System
Monitor to 40+)
- Mozilla-Firebird (sometimes can use ~80MB)
Moderately sensitive (grows, but not much):
- Nautilus
- Evolution
Valgrinding python running bittorrent-gui didn't show memleaks bigger
than few kb, but it seems that mem isn't freed properly until exit(),
and it have shown lots of accesses before malloc()ed area.
So to sum up, it looks like libc bug because:
1) It hits various apps, not only GNOME ones
2) Upgrading to X 4.3, GNOME 2.4 didn't help
3) It is definitely not kernel bug, because I've been using the same
kernel on Woody (2.4.18 + patches) for a while, and Woody worked
perfectly. Also IDE is set correctly (DMA on, HDD is pretty new -
ATA133)
4) It's memory-management issue, disk usage is almost certainly
swapping, because it freezes whole system
5) It was experienced on more than one box (the other person is being
cc'ed) with the same symptoms
My box configuration:
Athlon 2000 + Asus Mobo
Seagate 40GB
256MB RAM + 256MB swap
Riva TNT2
Sid, updated on weekly basis
Kernel - custom 2.4.20 (others were tried too)
GNOME 2.4, XFree 4.3, NVidia binary drivers (open ones were tried too)
If it is indeed glibc bug, I'd like to report it using BTS using
critical priority (it is showstopper on affected machines). I'll try to
provide any additional info you might need.
--
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2@wp.pl>
http://mathrick.blog.pl
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