Thanks Oliver for the helpful tip, that settles the confusion as to why Free count grows and used shrinks.
I've modified the rte_mempool library to maintain atomic pktmbuf malloc and free stats, hopefully that would help pinpoint the leak. Thanks again for your help! --Kam On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 4:58 AM, Olivier MATZ <olivier.matz at 6wind.com> wrote: > Hi Kam, > > On 11/28/2014 06:34 PM, Kamraan Nasim wrote: > > I have ~15Gbps of traffic flowing through two 10GE ports and been > profiling > > the rte mempool(or rather the pktmbuf mempool) memory consumption: > > > > I have per lcore caching disabled(cache_size is 0) > > > > I have noticed that: > > - Mempool FREE cnt(as given byt rte_mempool_free_count()) increases > > - Mempool USED cnt(as given by rte_mempool_used_count() decreases and > > eventually drops to 0. When this happens, mempool reports itself as EMPTY > > - rx_nombuf stats for the eth ports start climbing > > - Valgrind Memcheck does not indicate any obvious leaks in RTE mempool or > > my application. > > > > > > I was wondering if others have come across this issue? Or if people here > > have used ways, besides Valgrind to profile the mempool or the pkt mbuf > > pool? > > First, be careful with rte_mempool_free_count(): it returns the number > of free entries in the internal ring of the mempool, which actually > corresponds to the number of allocated objects from the mempool point > of view. See: > http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk/tree/lib/librte_mempool/rte_mempool.h > > If you have the number of allocated objects increasing, and the > statistics rx_nombuf increasing when the mbuf pool is empty, it means > that you have a mbuf leak in your application. Valgrind won't see it > since it does not know about mempool alloc/free functions. > > Regards, > Olivier >
