Re: Memory Black Hole
On 9/20/05, S3GFAULT <s3gfault@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> The subject of this message could have been 'Memory Leak' but honestly
> that doesn't sound dramatic enough for my problem.
>
> Warning, this turned out to be a longish email, for the impatient,
> please skip to the section marked SUMMARY at the bottom.
[snip]
> *)
> I dumped /proc/mem into a file on a workstation and opened it up in a
> hex editor, to examine all 256 megs of data. So, this is interesting.
> A very important clue it seems like that I am incapable of
> deciphering. I am finding that some files from the root filesystem
> have been inserted into the memory. A tarball from one users
> directory appears twice in main memory. /etc/passwd appears 11 times
> in memory!
This is normal; freed blocks are not zeroed until they are requested.
> The root partition is reiserfs. The boot partition, which is always
> mounted, is ext2. There are no files from /boot in memory that I can
> find.
>
> ---------------------------
> SUMMARY:
> Files or chunks of files from the root (reiserfs) partition are being
> inserted into memory at the rate of 4-16k/5 secs (2.4.18) or 60k/5
> secs (2.6.8). This memory is never freed. This insertion is not
> being caused by any user space program. If the only programs running
> are kernel processes, getty, bash, and top, it will still occur.
> Memory will be eaten up until about 5k is left, and then it
> stabilizes. Swap space will not be used. This behaviour occured
> under Debian Woody and Sarge. Sarge was tested with kernels of
> version 2.4.18 and 2.6.8.
>
> Does anyone have any idea what could possibly be causing this? Even
> advice to other references would be greatly appreciated.
Try getting a copy of /proc/meminfo /proc/slabinfo /proc/buddyinfo and
/proc/vmstat as it's going down, this may help diagnose the problem
better.
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