Kernel eating memory, ends up trashing

[Dag Wieers]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > 	MemTotal:        61676 kB
> > 	MemFree:           596 kB
> 
> > 	Active:           4912 kB
> > 	Inact_dirty:      1104 kB
> > 	Inact_laundry:     528 kB
> > 	Inact_clean:       964 kB
> 
> Oh dear, that is only 8MB free&pageable memory, out of 61MB
> total available memory after bootup...
> 
> > Is there anything I can try to help you find the cause ? This machine
> > has only ext3 and jbd loaded (that match other machines with the same
> > problems).
> 
> Exactly which kernel are you running ?

2.4.20-19.9 currently, but I have the same effect with 2.4.20-18 and 
2.4.20-20. The graph is exactly the same as it was weeks ago (every 2 
weeks this happens, only this time the system was responsive enough to 
return the information ;)

If I go to runlevel 1 when the system isn't trashing (with only bash and 
init running) the memory isn't freed (and not claimed by bash or init).


> I wonder if there's some leak in reclaiming ext3 pages
> after a truncate. Maybe they get erroneously removed
> from the pageout lists and we never find them...

Well, the system is running rrdtool for about 100 counters (2 machines) 
every 5 minutes. But once every evening (at 22h) it generates graphs and 
html-pages of all the data (+- 10months of data) in the rrd's and that 
seems to be causing the kernel to leak memory as is clearly shown on these 
older graphs:

	http://dag.wieers.com/rmon-breeg-mem-2weeks-200x80.png
	http://dag.wieers.com/rmon-breeg-mem-3months-800x120.png

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