Re: Bookworm system not responding on high memory usage
Timothy M Butterworth <timothy.m.butterworth@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 7:57 PM Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have an AMD64 system[1] that has been running fine on Bullseye for a
> few years, and recently following the soft freeze on Bookworm I upgraded
> my system to try it out, and the system has been frequently losing
> response. Initially I thought it was because of some issue of my
> qemu-based Win11 virtual machine as it happens most frequently when it
> was running and filed a bug report[2]. But then it happened again
> without it running because some other program had slowly used up most of
> the memory again, though not as frequently as the VM was running.
>
> Now in retrospect, when I was using Bullseye the total memory was also
> mostly used up most of the time, with a few hundreds of megabytes
> reported as free and a few Gigs reported as cache, and it has been
> running fine. I'm not sure what has changed in Bookworm and having to
> manually restart the machine is a pretty annoying and unpleasant
> experience.
>
> Does anyone seeing a similar problem as well? What can I do to avoid
> this? Any suggest is welcome.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Open the command prompt and run `su` to switch user to root. Then run `sync && echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` as
> root. This will write RAM caches to the hard drive to free up memory. You have to run this as root as sudo, my preferred
> method, returns a permission disabled error.
Thanks for the tip! I'll try it out.
>
>
> [1] System info from inxi:
> CPU: 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics (-MT MCP-)
> speed/min/max: 1199/1200/4679 MHz Kernel: 6.1.0-5-amd64 x86_64 Up: 7m
> Mem: 4844.4/31521.3 MiB (15.4%) Storage: 476.94 GiB (54.5% used) Procs: 535
> Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.25
>
> Your system has 32 GB of RAM, it should not be getting used up. Run `free -h` What desktop are you using: KDE, GNOME,
> LXQT etc? Are you using Wayland or X11? It looks like you have a memory leak in one of your applications. Try running
> `top` and press `m` to sort by memory utilization.
I actually have a cronjob that runs every 5 minutes and collects memory
usage. As I mentioned, it usually happens when I use qemu (see [1] for
free and [2] for top). At another time it happened when deluge is
leaking memory (see [3] for free [4] for top).
Interestingly as you can see, in all such cases, even though the free
amount is low, the buff/cache is still pretty large so the system is not
really overloaded. Plus, on Bullseye such memory usage also happens all
the time and this never happened. I was suspecting that maybe the
kernel is panicking when memory hits certain limit, but I don't see it
in kern.log or syslog.
Any suggestion to restore to Bullseye status is appreciated. Thanks in
advance!
[1] `free -h` when using qemu:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 30Gi 14Gi 258Mi 216Mi 17Gi 16Gi
Swap: 979Mi 80Mi 899Mi
[2] `top` sorted by memory when using qemu:
top - 16:10:05 up 1:29, 11 users, load average: 1.83, 1.86, 2.06
Tasks: 494 total, 1 running, 493 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 8.3 us, 8.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 75.0 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 31522.7 total, 257.2 free, 14430.8 used, 17504.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 980.0 total, 899.5 free, 80.5 used. 17091.9 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10131 libvirt+ 20 0 11.2g 8.1g 26140 S 213.3 26.2 75:08.67 qemu-sy+
6547 xiyueden 20 0 4432172 1.4g 207312 S 0.0 4.5 1:53.44 thunder+
...
[3] `free -h` when using deluge:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 30Gi 12Gi 1.9Gi 219Mi 17Gi 18Gi
Swap: 979Mi 2.2Mi 977Mi
[4] `top` sorted by memory when using deluge:
top - 10:40:05 up 3 days, 17:11, 11 users, load average: 1.25, 1.22, 1.20
Tasks: 492 total, 1 running, 490 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 25.0 us, 0.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 75.0 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 31521.3 total, 1909.2 free, 12762.9 used, 17529.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 980.0 total, 977.7 free, 2.2 used. 18758.4 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7287 xiyueden 20 0 9030940 6.6g 503076 S 0.0 21.3 97:11.62 deluge-+
5271 xiyueden 20 0 4581328 1.6g 191000 S 6.7 5.2 108:23.57 thunder+
...
>
> Tim
>
>
> [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1032400
>
> --
> Manphiz
--
Manphiz
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