[clug] Memory Leak In cAosity

[Steve Walsh]

I have absolutely no objection to it using all the ram, but when it's using
90% Ram just sitting there, with 2 small domains and only basic services
installed (MySQL, PHP4, Apache, Exim, SpamAssassin, some Perl and SNMP
stuff), I don't want to know what it will be like when it's at full capacity
with the estimated 300 domains it'll get shortly...

sc8-pr-web2.sourceforge.net averages 40% memory usage (it spikes to 90% when
the rsync cron runs, but otherwise floats around 40%), and our current
webservers float between 13% (Mandrake9 2.4.21 on a P3 550/256Mb) to 46%
(Gentoo 2.6.12 on a P4 2.4Ghz/512Mb).

Anywho, The simple application of thought when reading the output of "ps
aux" has found the culprits to be some Mysql maintenance scripts that had
hung, and a rogue mailmail queue cycle that was trying to handle the
incoming and outgoing queues at the same time, rather than sequentially.

S.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Couter
Sent: Thursday, 4 August 2005 6:54 PM
To: linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [clug] Memory Leak In cAosity


Steve Walsh wrote:
> I've got a Dual Xeon 2.8 box with 1Gb ECC running cAosity (RHEL knockoff)
> x86-64 with a rather horrific
> memory leak. I can reboot the box and have about 10% memory usage, then
> after about 8 hours it's at 25%, and within 30 hours of a reboot it's at
90%
> where it stays.

You've paid for this memory, why don't you want it to be used? Is it for
decoration?

Linux uses all the memory it can. It's caching stuff so it doesn't need
to read from the disk next time you access it. It also caches stuff that
hasn't yet been written to the disk so it can order writes for better
performance.

If you have some program that's actually leaking memory or allocating
large amounts of memory, 'top' can show you. But what you've described
sounds like intended behaviour.
--
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at teknohaus.dyndns.org
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