System hanging during dump

Peter Jeremy peterjeremy at optushome.com.au
Sun Nov 2 01:37:09 PDT 2008


Sorry for the late reply.

On 2008-Oct-19 11:39:02 +0300, Kostik Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have built myself a looping 'ps -axl' which should let me gather more
>> information if it does re-appear.  (In the process, I've found that ps
>> leaks memory, though that's not a problem until you wrap it in a loop).
>
>What memory ? Kernel one ? How did you noted this ? Could you add
>vmstat -z and vmstat -m to the loop and watch what allocation grows ?

ps(1) malloc's memory and doesn't free it.  This isn't an issue in
normal operation because it's a once-through program.  I hacked ps to
turn the guts of main() into a while(1){} loop and this showed the
process was growing.  There were a couple of superfluous strdup()
calls that could be removed but I don't think it's worth making it
exhaustively clean up after itself (my hacking included hard-wiring
the options so I'm not sure my cleanup code is complete in the general
case).  As a low priority, I'll create a PR covering the strdup's.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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