Re: Memory leak in 2.1.54

Todd Roy (tmr@holstein.com)
Tue, 9 Sep 1997 19:42:50 -0400


> Date: Tue, 9 Sep 1997 11:49:18 -0400
> From: Bill Hawes <whawes@star.net>
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> Zlatko Calusic wrote:
> > Now I'll try to convince you, once more, that we deal here with
> > massive memory leak, too. Of course, I can be wrong, but something
> > smells very bad in dcache code. :)
>
> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there _aren't_ memory leaks; I'm sure
> there are many waiting to be found. But in the case of 2.1.54, the
> dcache and inode memory can grow excessively and give the symptoms of a
> leak.
>
> The ls -alR command is a good test case, as it floods the system with
> many new dentries and inodes, so it takes a while for the age-sorted
> reclamation to take place. I'm doing some experimentation with it now.
>
> The patch I posted should help a lot, though it's not perfect yet.
>
> Regards,
> Bill
>

Bill,

I installed both your inode patch and your alloc patch, but not
your minix patch to my 2.1.54 at home. I did a ls -alR from root, and
only started to see the memory usage (ie swap) climb and not go back down
when it started into my dos partitions. A very subjective test, but there you
have it.

-- todd --

(The machine at work has both patches, but with 2.1.55-pre1. Frankly, I didn't
really have time to really test it out. Fixed the ext2 problems though.)