I believe I have a memory leak someplace on the system, over several days I watch the used memory slowly climb and eventually the system starts swapping, the application load has not changed. I have tried stopping processes and restarting them in the hopes that the memory would be returned to the system but no such luck.
The system is Fedora Core 4, the main applications on the system are:
mailman 2.1.7 (built from sources) exim 4.60 (built from sources) spamassassin 3.10 (built from sources) named 9.3.2 (built from sources)
everything else was installed via yum and is the most current install available from the FC repositories.
These programs are: apache 2.0.54 postgresql 8.0.6 (used for exim's databases only) perl 5.8.6 python 2.4.1 imap/popd version ?? sshd (Open SSH) 4.2P1 Kernel 2.4.16-1 How can I track down the source of the memory leak?
according to "top" spamd (spamassassin) is the largest consumer of memory, however it seems to stay pretty stable compaired to how fast memory usage is climbing
TIA, Jeff
Jeffrey Ross wrote:
I believe I have a memory leak someplace on the system, over several days I watch the used memory slowly climb and eventually the system starts swapping
How much does it swap?
New users often ask about memory use, since "free" memory will under normal conditions, shrink toward 0.
Example output from the "free" command: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1555352 1518588 36764 0 61120 855200 -/+ buffers/cache: 602268 953084 Swap: 1044216 848 1043368
In that example, my workstation with 1.5GB of RAM has just 36M of free memory. However, swap barely has anything at all in it, less than 1M.
The key is the memory used for write buffers and cached files. Files, when accessed, will be stored in memory as long as nothing else is contending for the space. That way, when they're accessed again, they don't need to be read off of the disk. This boosts performance, and decreases wear on the disk and power consumption.
To simplify the math, "free" prints a second line which shows memory use, but doesn't count cached files. That line, in the example, shows that ~600M is used by applications, and ~950M is free memory.
Jeffrey Ross wrote:
I believe I have a memory leak someplace on the system, over several days I watch the used memory slowly climb and eventually the system starts swapping, the application load has not changed. I have tried stopping processes and restarting them in the hopes that the memory would be returned to the system but no such luck.
The system is Fedora Core 4, the main applications on the system are:
mailman 2.1.7 (built from sources) exim 4.60 (built from sources) spamassassin 3.10 (built from sources) named 9.3.2 (built from sources)
everything else was installed via yum and is the most current install available from the FC repositories.
These programs are: apache 2.0.54 postgresql 8.0.6 (used for exim's databases only) perl 5.8.6 python 2.4.1 imap/popd version ?? sshd (Open SSH) 4.2P1 Kernel 2.4.16-1 How can I track down the source of the memory leak?
according to "top" spamd (spamassassin) is the largest consumer of memory, however it seems to stay pretty stable compaired to how fast memory usage is climbing
TIA, Jeff
I saw a similar problem with kernel-2.6.15-1.1824_FC4 on one server. I tracked it back to slab debugging.
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Gordon Messmer -
Jeffrey Ross -
Nathan Grennan