Re: How to diagnose a kernel memory leak

Bruce Guenter
2005-05-13T21:30:19Z

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On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 05:18:25PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> It all looks pretty innocent. Please send the contents of /proc/meminfo
> rather than the `free' output. /proc/meminfo has much more info.

Here are the current meminfo numbers:

MemTotal: 2055648 kB
MemFree: 56512 kB
Buffers: 236880 kB
Cached: 869616 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 1004124 kB
Inactive: 729732 kB
HighTotal: 1179072 kB
HighFree: 3584 kB
LowTotal: 876576 kB
LowFree: 52928 kB
SwapTotal: 1028152 kB
SwapFree: 1028096 kB
Dirty: 1036 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 13100 kB
Slab: 252444 kB
CommitLimit: 2055976 kB
Committed_AS: 25704 kB
PageTables: 1060 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 4700 kB
VmallocChunk: 109836 kB

If I am counting right, free+buffers+cached+slab comes to 1415452 kB.
Of course, at this point, it is far from out of memory like it has been
in the past. I am continuing to monitor, and will post numbers when it
gets closer to what I have previously observed.

> If the /proc/meminfo output indicates that there are a lot of slab pages
> then /proc/slabinfo should be looked at.

That was my first thought, yes. However, when it has run out of memory,
even the slab totals were low (my first post showed only about 60 MB in
slab).