Re: How to diagnose a kernel memory leak

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

(Please always do reply-to-all)

Bruce Guenter <bruceg@em.ca> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 10:29:21AM +0200, Alexander Nyberg wrote:
> > the patch below might help as it works on a lower
> > level. It accounts for bare pages in the system available
> > from /proc/page_owner. So a cat /proc/page_owner > tmpfile would be good
> > when the system starts to go low. There's a sorting program in
> > Documentation/page_owner.c used to sort the rather large output.
> 
> I've been running this for a day and a half now, and a few hundred megs
> of memory is now missing:
> 
> # free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:       2055648    2001884      53764          0     259024     868484
> -/+ buffers/cache:     874376    1181272
> Swap:      1028152         56    1028096
> 
> I've put the output from the sorting program up at
> 	http://untroubled.org/misc/page_owner_sorted
> 
> Is this useful information yet, or is there still too much in cached
> pages to really identify the source?

It all looks pretty innocent.  Please send the contents of /proc/meminfo
rather than the `free' output.  /proc/meminfo has much more info. 
Sometimes /proc/vmstat is also useful.

If the /proc/meminfo output indicates that there are a lot of slab pages
then /proc/slabinfo should be looked at.