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I have a server running Samba, bind, dhcp, cups and MySQL.
I have noticed that over a day the memory in use gradually grows, with the swap file growing and growing, but in cache only.
Then physical rams runs ow, and the server slows down. A reboot speeds it up.
Howver the memory is never cleared down when people log off and go home.
I can's as yet seem to identify what is taking up the ram. (2GB)
Any thoughts?
Kind regards
Benedict White
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I had the same issue, and I through it was a memory leak until....
... I discovered it was not an issue. I'll give you more details when I go back home if you want. I classified it as 'normal behaviour' since the kernel 2.6.~20 but maybe I miss something.
It has something to do with shm. Shared memory filesystem that takes as much memory as available, and free memory when requested.
I have only samba, cups and mysql. All I know is that mysql takes 100MB + 100MB cache.
Are you sure that your server slow down ?
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Hmm.. Well, yes I am sure the server slows down quite a lot, in terms of file access.
That said I note what you say about the kernel version and memory management.
I would appreaciate more details when you get home if you have them.
Also, the process takes about a day on my server, slowly filling up the memory as performance degrades.
Kind regards
Benedict White
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Ok, so here is the thing on my box.
During the installation of ArchLinux, I used the standard /etc/fstab which contains :
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0So now when I check mounted partitions :
# df -H
/dev/hda8 16G 6,5G 8,3G 44% /
none 1,1G 0 1,1G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 16G 11G 4,1G 73% /homeHere you can see that /dev/shm is a 1.1G sized tmpfs partition.
tmpfs is a file system used for in memory temporary files. Access to such files is very quick, and they are definitively lost when you power down your computer.
But tmpfs takes ram, tmpfs takes many ram, and tmpfs takes as much ram as he wants. tmpfs put directly its memory in swap, but it should be cached swap because you have 2G RAM. Check your memory usage with 'top'. It should display a lot of cached swap.
So tmpfs is used by some programs (I don't know any but I heard there are some). You can check fs usage with df and check the content of /dev/shm directory.
Resolution:
You should keep tmpfs for performance of some programs.
I don't remember what I've done but the size of tmpfs don't match my memory usage.
It seems you can gives tmpfs a size in fstab but I never tried.
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,size=512M 0 0Correct me if I'm wrong.
I hope it will help you.
Last edited by oliv (2007-08-09 18:57:36)
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