[rt-devel] Severe Memory Leak

[Robert Spier]

At Wed, 24 Sep 2003 21:02:56 +0100,
Simon Talbot wrote:
> I hear what you say, but this would not account for the system getting
> to a point where it runs out of physical and virtual memory and you end
> with a kernel oops -- something is definitely leaking and of course you
> can fix it by brute force, but isolating the errant module/area of code
> has to be preferable. This certainly does provide me with another
> workaround whilst we investigate further,

The kernel oops points to something else going on.

    - Do you have memory overcommit activated?  If so, turn it off.
     ~$ cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory 
     0

      The kernel should kill the big process, which you didn't
      identify.  Is it apache?  Is it mysql?  Is it
      netscape/mozilla/opera/konqueror?

    - You may have bad ram.  Download memtest86 (if you are running on
      the appropriate hardware) and test.

    - You did not tell us what the oops is.  I don't care what the CPU
      registers were, but it would be nice to know where the oops
      happened.   

I highly doubt that this is a user-space configuration problem.

-R