Bug 59808
| Summary: | Huge memory usage; doesn't free any: system crashes. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Need Real Name <orozco> |
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Arjan van de Ven <arjanv> |
| Status: | CLOSED ERRATA | QA Contact: | Brian Brock <bbrock> |
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | high | ||
| Version: | 7.2 | CC: | alan, thuard |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | i686 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2003-06-08 01:23:31 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
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Description
Need Real Name
2002-02-13 15:36:46 UTC
There's a minor issue which basically means that the kernel sometimes is eager to swap, and then also later is not too happy to give the swap back. But that shouldn't trigger with 700Mb or more of ram.... It is normal that the kernel caches disk data for speed, so don't expect "free" to be huge; "Cached" should be huge.... One thing is being eager to swap. The question is that the system eats almost
all memory before that. Output from my /proc/meminfom after one week of usage:
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 789172224 763330560 25841664 585728 176377856 417247232
Swap: 2690293760 147456 2690146304
MemTotal: 770676 kB
MemFree: 25236 kB
MemShared: 572 kB
Buffers: 172244 kB
Cached: 407324 kB
SwapCached: 144 kB
Active: 321884 kB
Inact_dirty: 175560 kB
Inact_clean: 82840 kB
Inact_target: 196608 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 770676 kB
LowFree: 25236 kB
SwapTotal: 2627240 kB
SwapFree: 2627096 kB
System starts to noticeably freeze slowly. No abnormally huge CPU or mem usage
by any running application/daemon server as reported by 'top'. What is using the
memory and not freeing it? Any clue? Thanks.
We see similar problems on our machines, ranging from single PII/400 with 384MB RAM to dual PIII/800 with 1024MB to PIV/1700 with 2048MB. Incorrect 'free' results interfere with our job scheduling because the machine(s) can appear to have insufficient free RAM (+/- buffers/cache). Sometimes, running a program which requests and modifies as much memory as it can restores the 'free' numbers to normal without reboot, but this does not always work. In a couple of instances, it appeared that the system got into a memory starved state and started killing processes at random, eventually crashing. This bug was introduced in 2.4 series of kernels up to and including 2.4.9-31. I've even tried 2.4.19-pre4 and observed the same 'free' problem. Correct /proc/meminfo and 'free' numbers are essential for stable operation, or else GIGO behavior results. I think I am having the same problem. I am running Redhat 7.1/KDE on a Dell Inspiron 8100 with 512 MB of memory. I find that when I log into my system, the allocated memory grows steadily (usually) with time. When I start, the approximately 100 MB of memory is allocated, but typically after a day or two, all of my memory has been allocated... even if I have NO windows or applications running! If I log out and restart X, memory allocation doesn't change. The only way I can get the memory allocation back to a reasonable level is to reboot my machine. At least one time, after rebooting my machine and logging in, my memory allocation jumped from about 100 MB to about 300 MB (while my disk drive was "grinding away"). I didn't do *anything*! I think I had one or two text editors open, that's it. I was reading some messages about a similar problem on a Yahoo message board (for linux users on Dell computers) from people running KDE under Redhat 7.1 having the same sort of problem. A few people thought that the problem was with a memory leak from the ethernet card; we all might be using the same internal ethernet card provided by Dell. OK, I'm not too sure what I'm talking about at this point. I am just a UNIX (Solaris) user who has just started using Redhat. I'm very happy with Redhat on the laptop; however, the memory leak is very serious. (By the way, I did install the kdelib***.rpm fixes provided on the Redhat "up2date" installation, which mention that they help to fix a memory leak. They just didn't fix mine.) Should all be fixed in current errata if not re-open - thanks |