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From: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: russell@rickstewart.com, bugme-daemon@bugzilla.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
	John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>,
	Robert Love <rlove@rlove.org>
Subject: Re: [Bugme-new] [Bug 12754] New: inotify doesn't free memory allocated to watches
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:38:00 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090224213800.GI28946@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090224130523.f6c4c450.akpm@linux-foundation.org>

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 01:05:23PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:

> > We have webcams that take photos every 5 minutes.  I run a daemon
> > that detects the creation of a new webcam photo then makes a thumbnail
> > of it.  Eventually it stopped working.  I figured out that I could
> > not create new watches:  inotify_add_watch reported "No space left on device".
> > I create all the watches with the ONESHOT parameter so they are deleted
> > as soon as they are triggered.  When I make it display the watch number
> > it's always 3.  A new watch is added only when the old watch has been
> > triggered.  inotify isn't recovering the memory from deleted watches.
> 
> So we have a serious leak.  
> 
> A few fixes have gone into inotify since 2.6.28.  I don't immediately
> see any which would address this bug, but it would be worth testing
> 2.6.29-rc6 if poss, please.  Hopefully those fixes also got fed back
> into 2.6.28.x, but that path is somewhat unreliable.
> 
> If it isn't yet fixed then I'm not sure how to get it fixed, really -
> inotify development is a bit quiet.

Build with CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB_LEAK (and yes, that means CONFIG_SLAB),
reproduce that and see what's in /proc/slab_allocators.  FWIW, we probably
ought to port that stuff to SLUB et.al., but that's a different story...

  reply	other threads:[~2009-02-24 21:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <bug-12754-10286@http.bugzilla.kernel.org/>
2009-02-24 21:05 ` [Bugme-new] [Bug 12754] New: inotify doesn't free memory allocated to watches Andrew Morton
2009-02-24 21:38   ` Al Viro [this message]
2009-02-24 23:23     ` Al Viro
2009-02-24 23:40       ` Andrew Morton
2009-02-25  0:28         ` Al Viro
2009-02-25  0:40           ` Andrew Morton
2009-02-25  2:38           ` Josef Bacik
2009-02-25  3:13             ` Al Viro

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