From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751066AbWGQQxR (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:53:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751069AbWGQQxR (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:53:17 -0400 Received: from port-83-236-173-99.static.qsc.de ([83.236.173.99]:63941 "EHLO isl.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751066AbWGQQxQ (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:53:16 -0400 Message-ID: <44BBC09D.5060409@isl.de> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:53:49 +0200 From: Andreas Rieke User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050728 X-Accept-Language: de MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Kernel memory leak? X-Enigmail-Version: 0.92.1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, after booting a machine, it runs well using about 300 M of 1 G physical RAM. However, the remaining RAM decreases day by day, and after 2 or 3 weeks, the machine crashes because swapping takes too much time. However, all processes together take about 250 MBytes according to ps, thus I assume that the kernel takes the rest. free tells me in fact that much swap space is used an nearly no physical RAM is left. This behaviour has been seen on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 2.4 kernel and on SuSE Linux 10 with a 2.6.13-15-default kernel. There are no unusual things running on the machine, the main application is an apache web server with a PostgreSQL database. Is there any kernel support to detect where the memory has gone? Is any kind of memory eating virus or worm known? Is it possible that processes request memory which is NOT considered in /proc or in the procps tools? Is it possible that processes are invisible in /proc or in the procps tools? Thanks in advance, Andreas