Memory leaks (Desperate help!)

[Teresa e Junior <teresaejunior@gmail.com>]

Hello!

Please, I need some attention or I may end up damaging my machine!

I've been struggling for not few hours with memory leaks on this
machine. I'm running 2.6.32-5-686, and the problem is as follows:

Some months ago, I have compiled kernel 2.6.33-2-686 without any issues
in this same machine. This week I have tried compiling GNUzilla Icecat
and the 2.6.35 kernel, but when compiling the kernel, when it is just
starting compiling, all real memory (2GB) fills, and when beginning to
swap, the machine becomes absolutely unresponsive. With Icecat, it
takes 15 minutes before this happens, and today I tried leaving it
working for almost 5 hours, unresponsive, before killing the machine.

I killed the machine almost 10 times this week with high I/O activity.
I've already tried changing vm.swapinness to 60, and
vm.overcommit_memory to 2, but nothing helps. Also disabled the memlock
available for audio applications, but nothing yet. Increased my swap to
10GB, but nothing.

So here goes the output of some commands:

# sysctl -a | grep vm. | sort
error: permission denied on key 'net.ipv4.route.flush'
error: permission denied on key 'net.ipv6.route.flush'
vm.block_dump = 0
vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10
vm.dirty_bytes = 0
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000
vm.dirty_ratio = 20
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500
vm.drop_caches = 0
vm.highmem_is_dirtyable = 0
vm.hugepages_treat_as_movable = 0
vm.hugetlb_shm_group = 0
vm.laptop_mode = 0
vm.legacy_va_layout = 0
vm.lowmem_reserve_ratio = 256	32	32
vm.max_map_count = 65530
vm.memory_failure_early_kill = 0
vm.memory_failure_recovery = 1
vm.min_free_kbytes = 3789
vm.mmap_min_addr = 65536
vm.nr_hugepages = 0
vm.nr_overcommit_hugepages = 0
vm.nr_pdflush_threads = 0
vm.oom_dump_tasks = 0
vm.oom_kill_allocating_task = 0
vm.overcommit_memory = 0
vm.overcommit_ratio = 50
vm.page-cluster = 3
vm.panic_on_oom = 0
vm.percpu_pagelist_fraction = 0
vm.scan_unevictable_pages = 0
vm.stat_interval = 1
vm.swappiness = 60
vm.vdso_enabled = 1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 100

$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority             (-e) 0
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 16382
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority              (-r) 0
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) unlimited
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers cached
Mem:          1987        437       1549          0    51         192
-/+ buffers/cache:        193       1793
Swap:        10240          0      10240


Any help will be appreciated!
Teresa e Junior