Re: 2.6.13.3 Memory leak, names_cache

[Robert Derr <rderr@weatherflow.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Robert Derr wrote:
>   
>> I'm having a problem with a memory leak in the kernel.  I'm running 2.6.13.3
>> from kernel.org on FC4 on a Dell  Poweredge 2850 Duel Xeon 3ghz with 2GB RAM.
>>     
>
> Just out of interest, do you have CONFIG_AUDIT_SYSCALL enabled? Does it go 
> away if you disable it?
>   
It looks like it is enabled.  CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL=y in .config, right?
> Also, what filesystems do you use? And if you run
>
> 	while : ; do cat /proc/slabinfo | grep names_cache ; sleep 2; done
>
> in one terminal, can you see if you can find any correlation to some 
> particular action or behaviour that would seem to be part of leaking it?
>   
I'm not sure if I can find the action or behavior causing the problem.  
The server is the master node on a 14 computer cluster running a 
mesoscale weather forecasting package so there's a million things going 
on all the time.  I guess I could write a program to compare all the 
processes running against the names_cache and look for any correlation.

Here's the output of mount.  The drives are all ext3

/dev/sda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev/devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
> It really shouldn't grow very big at all normally. Ie the counts are 
> normally something like a few tens of entries used or whatever - all the 
> allocations should basically be temporary, and your 200+ _thousand_ 
> entries are way out of line.
>
> If you can't find anything obvious, then we can try to figure out a way to 
> just print out the contents of your name entries, I bet that would give a 
> clue about who is allocating them. But there's also been various leak 
> debugging patches out there that may help.  Manfred may have pointers.
>
> 		Linus
>   
I'll look for those leak debugging patches.
Thanks for your time. 

Robert J Derr
Weatherflow, Inc.