Re: [2.6.18-rc6] ext3 memory leak

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 07 September 2006 07:10, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>this looks like a serious problem to be fixed before 2.6.18 final and
>backported to 2.6.17.*. Or a case of me misunderstanding something, in
>which case, please, let me know.
>
>I've reported before in thread "[2.6.17.4] slabinfo.buffer_head
> increases" a memory leak in ext3. Today I verified it is still present
> in 2.6.18-rc6.
>
>A short description: as long as write accesses are made on an ext3
>filesystem /proc/slabinfo buffer_head increases unboundedly. This
>behaviour is not observed with another journalling filesystems (e.g.,
>reiserfs), or if ext3 is mounted as ext2.
>
What would you call the 'get excited' level?  Here, with about 12 hours of 
uptime (I had an unlogged machine shutdown while I was offsite yesterday), 
I'm showing 

buffer_head        67158  67158     48   78    1 : tunables  120   60    
0 : slabdata    861    861      0

There are other entries that are larger here.  However I do note that its 
growing on a per cycle basis as fetchmail is doing its thing every 90 
seconds.  Now its
buffer_head        67672  67704     48   78    1 : tunables  120   60    
0 : slabdata    868    868      0

So perhaps thats why it did the shutdown?  With absolutely zip in the logs?

Although, my firewall box was also reset/rebooted about the same time as 
this ones powerdown according to an uptime report on it just now, so my 
ups must not be doing its thing correctly.

>As it seems serious enough to me I'm sending it to ext3 maintainers.
>
>Thanks
>Guennadi
>---------------------------------
>Guennadi Liakhovetski, Ph.D.
>DSA Daten- und Systemtechnik GmbH
>Pascalstr. 28
>D-52076 Aachen
>Germany
>-
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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