Re: Strange memory leak in 2.6.x

[Alexander Nyberg <alexn@dsv.su.se>]

> > > Please grab 2.6.11, apply the below patch, set CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER and follow
> > > the below instructions.
> > 
> > thank you for you mails. We installed the patch from Alex on a test-system
> > last night and will switch it to the production machine this evening. The
> > problem will start after 48-72 hours, so we hope to send feedback
> > on friday.
> 
> Ok, we had another crash this morning after an uptime of only 36
> hours 8-(.
> 
> No oom-killer this time, but we got a very high load (>40) in the
> end. Our cron-job which starts the page_owner-sort every 10 minutes
> didn't return the last 4 times.
> 
> The new 2.6.11-kernel changed the graphs a little bit - values for
> 'MemTree' are much higher, but values for 'Cached' and 'Buffered' are
> still very low.
> 
> Here the graph for the last week:
> 
>   http://download.hennerich.de/memory-leak2.png
> 
> (the left part is the same like our first graph last week
> http://download.hennerich.de/memory-leak.png, the weekend is well visible)
> 
> Detailed view of the last 40 hours:
> 
>   http://download.hennerich.de/memory-leak3.png
> 
> Some output of the page_owner-sort:
> 
>
>   http://download.hennerich.de/page_owner_sorted_20050311_0820.bz2

Yikes something isn't right with these backtraces that page_owner is
showing. Even without frame pointers it shouldn't be this noisy.

I'm afraid I'm going to need to ask for more help, could you please
select CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER under 
Kernel hacking => "Compile the kernel with frame pointers"

And when that kernel is booted, could you directly send me the output
of /proc/page_owner (sort or unsorted) so that I can see if something is
wrong with the data it's producing (just to be sure).

If it works better with CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER, i'm also going to have to
ask you to do another one of these runs that you just did.

Thanks
Alexander