Re: Possible serious bug in glibc, assistance needed
On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 05:47:47PM +0100, Mathrick wrote:
> 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:
> So to sum up, it looks like libc bug because:
So take a simple testcase that shows the problem, attack it with strace
and gdb, and figure out what's going on.
I don't think this could be a libc bug. The memory allocation code is
some of the best, most-frequently tested code in the library and no one
else has seen anything similar.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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