Re: Memory Hogging

Stephen R. van den Berg (srb@cuci.nl)
Wed, 26 Jul 1995 12:16:39 +0200

florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de <florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de> wrote:
>>>with the httpd process, once in a while the system load will shoot up
>>>from an average of 0.05 to about 10 and stay there for 5 minutes whilst
>>>a httpd process decides that it is not actually going to get any more
>>>memory and dies.

>I have seen the same effect several times with the gopher daemon. Never
>with the NCSA httpd. I suspected, that the gopher-daemon is the bad ting,
>but maybe the kernel could do something wrong. (Linus? Any Idea?)
>(Some timer stuff going mad? Seems to be somewhat related to networking code.)

Well, personally I think that Linux returns some unexpected error code
at some point, the http daemon can't cope with that and somehow starts
expanding some buffers beyond control.

So, the problem maybe partly due to a broken kernel and partly due to
the inability to cope with the unexpected results (if at all possible,
we should fix the kernel of course).

-- 
Sincerely,                                                          srb@cuci.nl
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).
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