Kernel eating memory, ends up trashing

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:

> On August 8 I added a bugreport for a machine that trashes aprox. every 2 
> weeks because of the kernel eating memory. You can find it here:

> I know at least 2 other persons that have the same problems (on different 
> machines with a similar workload/functionality) so it seems to be a bug in 
> the kernel on a particular use of the VM.

The thing is, RHL8 and 9 have a completely different VM from
Severn.  Also, many people cannot reproduce this problem at
all.

This, together with your graphs, suggests it's more likely
to be a memory leak in some driver then a bug in the core VM
code.

Do you have anything suspicious in /proc/slabinfo when your
system gets close to crashing ?

In the RHL9 and RHL8 kernels, how big is free + active +
inactive* together?  How much space is unaccounted for ?

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan