From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1 Description of problem: I left command watch 'top -b -n1;echo;df -mT;echo;egrep "(dentry|inode)" /proc/slabinfo;echo;ls /data/burn|wc -l' running for a couple of hours and it swelled to 922 mega bytes. 4117 root 16 0 922M 922M 664 S 0.0 30.6 0:17 0 watch Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): procps-2.0.17-10 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. watch 'top -b -n1;echo;df -mT;echo;egrep "(dentry|inode)" /proc/slabinfo;echo;ls /data/burn|wc -l' 2. 3. Actual Results: watch swelled to 922MB Expected Results: No memory leak Additional info:
Haven't seen this sort of behaviour on other distros (though I haven't tried the exact same test case). Possibly fixed in upstream?
OTOH, I have absolutely no idea where top(1) gets these values; top show: 5065 root 15 0 3502M 3.4G 664 S 0.0 116.3 0:57 3 watch but statm only shows [1]root@denali:/proc/5065>cat statm 896338 896337 166 16303 16307 863727 55 ^^^^^^ Is 3.4GB even possible (x86, CONFIG_3GB afaict) - shouldn't user space be limited to 3GB??
In the file /proc/<pid>/statm are number of pages (!= bytes). For conversion to bytes: $ python -c "print 896337 << 2" 3585348 ... and it's 3.5 GB. It means the "top" is right in this case. It's maybe same kernel problem like in bug report #137927. Ville, which version of kernel are you using? (uname -a)
Well, the watch swelled way up to almost 12GB and a zsh swelled up to 1.5GB according to top before I had to reboot (for other reasons). (Obviously, they weren't that big for real.) I've seen this with all recent RHEL3ESu3 update kernels, at least with 2.4.21-20.ELsmp, 2.4.21-22.prune_icachefix.ELsmp (see bug #132639) and (I think) and 2.4.21-22. Now I'm running 2.4.21-15.
It seems 2.4.21-15 doesn't show this problem. Just the newer ones.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 137927 ***
This turned out to be a kernel bug, which has been fixed in RHEL3 U4 (as of kernel version 2.4.21-27.EL, built a couple of days ago).
The fix for this problem has also been committed to the RHEL3 U5 patch pool this evening (in kernel version 2.4.21-27.3.EL).
An errata has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2004-550.html