[Gllug] Troubleshooting Memory Leak

[James Laver]

n 24 Mar 2009, at 17:01, Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:

> I have a CentOS 5 server running nginx, httpd and a dozen or so
> mongrel instances.  Since this morning I've been experiencing a
> serious memory leak - about 2G in 2 hours, until the machine needs to
> be rebooted.  I've tried to answer the question "what changed", and I
> can't think of anything on my side...

No automatic updates?

> The sort of thing I can think of that fits the evidence would be
> something like a process is being created and then dying without
> returning the memory to the system.

Either way you'd be looking at a kernel bug. The kernel is supposed to  
protect you from sloppy code by cleaning up after processes that  
forget to deallocate memory, when the process terminates.

> However, I am unable to see the malloc's, and I can't currently think
> of a way to test this theory.

strace ought to let you look at what's happening if you have an idea  
of where to start

--James
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