Memory leak in the ramfs file system
A group of us from the handhelds.org site think that we have found a memory leak in the ramfs file system. After a long period of create and deleting small files in a mounted ramfs partition we have substantially less freemem. The problem has been confirmed on 2.4.2 on an i386 and StormARM ports. The problem was found by a developer running an application on an iPAQ that quickly writes a 4K file to the ramfs, does some editing of the file and it then deleted. The application will quickly eat up all free memory and cause the platform to fail within 5 minutes. Test case: from a shell, run this short script for a long period of time (over 1 hour): i=0 ; while : ; do echo 1 >$i ; rm $i ; i=`expr $i + 1` ; done This test was run on an Compaq iPAQ 3650 using the 2.4.2-rmk1-np3 kernel from the CVS repository on cvs.handhelds.org. The following two data points are the output from /proc/meminfo. The first 'cat' was done about 1 minute after the loop has been running. The second 'cat' was done 10 minutes after the script loop had been killed. # cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 31686656 21446656 102400 11264000 Swap:000 MemTotal:30944 kB MemFree: 1 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 0 kB Cached: 11000 kB Active: 4656 kB Inact_dirty: 4220 kB Inact_clean: 2124 kB Inact_target:0 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree:0 kB LowTotal:30944 kB LowFree: 1 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree:0 kB # cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 31686656 24178688 750796800 12357632 Swap:000 MemTotal:30944 kB MemFree: 7332 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 0 kB Cached: 12068 kB Active: 4560 kB Inact_dirty: 5384 kB Inact_clean: 2124 kB Inact_target: 16 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree:0 kB LowTotal:30944 kB LowFree: 7332 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree:0 kB -- Stephen L Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Memory leak in the ramfs file system
A group of us from the handhelds.org site think that we have found a memory leak in the ramfs file system. After a long period of create and deleting small files in a mounted ramfs partition we have substantially less freemem. The problem has been confirmed on 2.4.2 on an i386 and StormARM ports. The problem was found by a developer running an application on an iPAQ that quickly writes a 4K file to the ramfs, does some editing of the file and it then deleted. The application will quickly eat up all free memory and cause the platform to fail within 5 minutes. Test case: from a shell, run this short script for a long period of time (over 1 hour): i=0 ; while : ; do echo 1 $i ; rm $i ; i=`expr $i + 1` ; done This test was run on an Compaq iPAQ 3650 using the 2.4.2-rmk1-np3 kernel from the CVS repository on cvs.handhelds.org. The following two data points are the output from /proc/meminfo. The first 'cat' was done about 1 minute after the loop has been running. The second 'cat' was done 10 minutes after the script loop had been killed. # cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 31686656 21446656 102400 11264000 Swap:000 MemTotal:30944 kB MemFree: 1 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 0 kB Cached: 11000 kB Active: 4656 kB Inact_dirty: 4220 kB Inact_clean: 2124 kB Inact_target:0 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree:0 kB LowTotal:30944 kB LowFree: 1 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree:0 kB # cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 31686656 24178688 750796800 12357632 Swap:000 MemTotal:30944 kB MemFree: 7332 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 0 kB Cached: 12068 kB Active: 4560 kB Inact_dirty: 5384 kB Inact_clean: 2124 kB Inact_target: 16 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree:0 kB LowTotal:30944 kB LowFree: 7332 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree:0 kB -- Stephen L Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
