+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #174847 +++ From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: We at VMware, recently came across an issue where our application which uses glibc API calls (getpwent,getgrent,getpwname,getgrname) showed symptoms of memory leak. Our team isolated the issue to happen only when the host is configured to authenticate against a NIS+ server. Our application does a large number of the above mentioned API calls to get the entire user and group list for internal use in the application. The configuration where the issue is seen is when the NIS+ server is configured with 8000 or more users and similar number of groups. The memory leak is not seen if the local user/group list is configured similar to the NIS+ server with 8000+ entries. The memory leak soon (a couple of hours) leads to an out of memory condition which causes the process to crash and hence our application. For ease of use and test purposes, we have built a simple utility which is a stripped-down code version of what is implemented in the application for gathering the user/group data. Similar memory leak symptoms can be seen with this simple utility as well. I am attaching the source code of the simple utility. The hosts were this application has been tested are 1) VMware ESX Server 2.5.1 using GLIBC version 2.2.4-32, version 2.2.4-32.20 2) RHEL Workstation 3.0 U4 3) RHEL Advanced Server 4.0 U2 And we could observe the memory leak in all the cases. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1) Configure the NIS+ server with 8000+ users and groups 2) Configure a Linux Host to authenticate against the NIS+ server. [Make the host a NIS+ client and configure nsswitch.conf to use NIS+] 3) Compile the source code of the simple utility, attached with this email using gcc [ gcc -o nisMem NISMemoryChecking.c] 4) Open two terminal sessions. a) In one terminal session, run the simple utility as ./nisMem 0 2 0 - The first parameter is the maximum loop count [One full iteration of gathering user/group list] 2 - The second parameter is the sleep interval between two consecutive loops b) In the other terminal, run top | grep nis. 5) You will soon notice that the memory utilization of the program keeps constantly rising and never goes down until the application is killed with "^C" or is terminated through other mechanisms. Actual Results: we could observe the memory leak. Additional info:
ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/glibc/2.3.2-95.39.184362/ contains a so far only very lightly tested backport of the NIS+ fixes to RHEL3 glibc.
This issue is on Red Hat Engineering's list of planned work items for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.8 release. Engineering resources have been assigned and barring unforeseen circumstances, Red Hat intends to include this item in the 3.8 release.
An advisory 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-2006-0453.html