linux-kernel - Re: possible (ext4 related?) memory leak in kernel 2.6.26

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Message-ID: <20081002183613.GC29613@skywalker>
Date:	Fri, 3 Oct 2008 00:06:13 +0530
From:	"Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Quentin Godfroy <godfroy@...pper.ens.fr>
Cc:	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	David.Madore@....fr
Subject: Re: possible (ext4 related?) memory leak in kernel 2.6.26

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:27:29PM +0200, Quentin Godfroy wrote:
> Hi lists,
> 
> I'd like to report the following problem : after ~ 10 days' uptime on a
> Debian 2.6.26-1-686 kernel, my system becomes extremely sluggish and
> unresponsive and the OOM-killer starts targeting even innocent processes like
> identd or rsync (when the swap is disabled). The machine is low on RAM (192
> MB) but this has never been a problem before. As for the slowness, strace
> shows that the brk() syscall takes ages to complete; the blocking processes
> are in the D state (and for some reason the kernel gives no wchan info).
> 
> Free reports a large and constantly growing 'buffers' figure (more than
> 50% of the available memory). No userland processes seems to be consuming
> lare amounts of memory (sum of RSS in 'ps aux' is about 30 megs), and the
> overall system is mostly idle.
> 

We actually fixed one in 6be2ded1d7c51b39144b9f07d2c839e1bd8707f1.
It is not really a memory leak. But yes it was not releasing some
the prealloc space memory.

-aneesh
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