[ale] System losing memory

Jeff Lightner jlightner at water.com
Wed May 2 09:51:07 EDT 2007


Have you checked shared memory with ipcs?

Your mention of MySQL made me think of this.  Haven't used that but most
DB products use large shared memory segments.  If the DB was stopped
with a SIGKILL (either because something died or because some issued
kill -9 or one of its variants) it would NOT clean up the shared memory
segment in use.  

You'd have to use ipcrm to remove the segment.  DANGER - ipcrm can be
very destructive if you remove structures that are actually in use.  If
you're not sure it would be better to reboot to clean up everything.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 9:35 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] System losing memory

cfowler wrote:
> With top -b he sees it all so I don't think it is on another page.
>
> I had this problem in the past.  It turned out to be a driver that was
> not doing a kfree() for each kmalloc().  The only fix was to restart
the
> system to free the memory.  
>
> If you go into single user mode do you get that memory used back?
>   
It's remote so I don't have easy access to the console.  I'll have to 
arrange that.
> Try pmap and see what each process is using.
>   
I looped through all the processes with a short perl script and applied 
pmap to each.  The results were consistent with the output of ps and 
top.  No surprises.  I'm guessing the kernel is eating it up somehow.  
Nothing strange about it however:

Linux version 2.6.9-42.0.10.plus.c4 (mockbuild at builder4.centos.org) (gcc

version 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)) #1 Tue Feb 27 16:24:55 EST
2007


>
>   
Thanks,

Jim.
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