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Re: Strange memory consumption



On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Peter L. Peres wrote:


> Just a wild guess: You are running an 'all-X' system. There was a bug
> somewhere in init that made it go berserk if there was nothing open on a
> console once upon a time. The bug caused very high load w/o reason, but no
> memory leaks. The remedy was, to leave a login (getty whatever) in
> inittab on the X-only runlevel. It's also possible that there is a problem
> with the chipset and/or caching with that much ram. Dejanews ?

Actually, that stupid bug manifests also when you do have a few vc's and X
too. But, when it does, the process X is about 95%-98%, and that shows
nicely on top. For example:


  1:39am  up 30 days,  6:31, 13 users,  load average: 0.30, 0.29, 0.31
83 processes: 78 sleeping, 3 running, 1 zombie, 1 stopped
CPU states: 17.8% user, 110.3% system, 118.5% nice,  0.0% idle
Mem:  47032K av, 46024K used,  1008K free, 30128K shrd,  3756K buff
Swap: 102812K av, 15156K used, 87656K free               11204K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
25460 root      19   0 12688 11028   872 R       0 99.9 23.4 16629:03 X



So, if you have a more elegant fix (don't tell me to Install Accelx 4.1 :)
please tell me.


;)))

--Ariel


> 
> Re: Memory: If I remember well from my kernel hacking sessions, then the
> malloced memory is not reclaimed as soon as freed by the app, instead it
> is freed when the list of free blocks gets too short (which is good for
> GC). If one of your sessions would grab pieces of memory for buffers and
> release them often, such as for example to serve Xsession requests, then
> it would look like that in 'free'. This one is just a wild guess, but I
> know that it takes up to 5 seconds for freed memory to show in a mem/free
> listing under load.
> 
> hope this helps,
> 	Peter
> 
> 

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   | Ariel Biener                                                  |
   | e-mail: ariel@post.tau.ac.il        Work ph: 03-6406086       |
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