Kernel eating memory, ends up trashing

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:
> > On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > This, together with your graphs, suggests it's more likely
> > > to be a memory leak in some driver then a bug in the core VM
> > > code.
> > 
> > With driver you don't mean a loaded module ? Is there some way to find
> > out what driver/module is allocating this memory ?
> 
> There's no really easy way.  The best way would be to look at
> which drivers you are using and compare that list with the
> drivers being used by the other people who have this problem.

Ok, this is fairly easy for the modules: ext3 and jbd
Since one of the other machines crashing was a tokenring, I'm sure it's 
not the mii module or any of the NIC drivers. And no other modules match 
the other systems.

One of the other persons (and I hope they'll join this discussion soon) 
reported he already tried running the same setup on three different 
systems (completely different HW). And the system trashes every 6 to 8 
hours (he now manages to work around it by rebooting often).


> Then look at people who don't have the problem at all. Scratch
> the drivers on problemless systems from the list of suspects.

Well, I'm almost certain that doing the same stuff on almost any RH9 
system will have it trash (either slow or fast depending on the amount of 
memory and the IO). So it may be memory-usage related or IO-utilisation 
related.

Maybe IDE ? I'm not sure if all the machines are IDE.


Thanks for your time,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]