On 9/20/05, S3GFAULT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
