[jonathan.glass@oit.gatech.edu: Re: [Flow-tools] Memory leak ?]

[Peter Jeremy]

[flow-capture process too large]

On Fri, 2006-Jan-06 11:08:54 +0200, Todor Dragnev wrote:
>Can someone help with this ?

Help how?  AFAIK, flow-control/flow-capture is not a FreeBSD port so
finding someone here with knowledge of it may be difficult.  If you
think it's a problem with FreeBSD, you're going to need to supply more
information so that we can help you.

>>>I use flow-control from about 1 week. My OS is FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE #0
>>>for AMD64. All works fine but yesterday I found  this in dmesg:
>>>
>>>Jan  4 21:30:58 katana kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
>>>Jan  4 21:30:58 katana kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(12): failed
>>>Jan  4 21:30:58 katana kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(6): failed
...
>>>518 root        1  96    0  2648M   104M select   0:33  0.00% flow-capture

This means you've run out of swap space.  The top output shows that
the offending process was flow-capture.  Presumably you already knew
this much.

>>>My starting line for flow-capture is:
>>>
>>>/usr/local/bin/flow-capture -p /var/run/flow-capture.pid -n 287 -N 0 -w 
>>>/var/log/netflows/ -S 5 /127.0.0.1/8899
>>>
>>>Is that huge memory usage is memory leak or I do something wrong ?

The command line means nothing to me.  How big a process size were you
expecting?  If you kill and restart the process, how big is it
initially?  What libraries is it using?  What does it do?

>>I think the easiest way to start looking at this would be to run
>>flow-capture under a memory debugger of some sort, like efence 
>>(Electric Fence Malloc Debugger).

Have you tried this suggestion?  Note that phkmalloc (the standard
FreeBSD malloc) has some good debugging facilities built in - check
malloc(3) for details.

>I'm running flow-capture on AMD64 on Fedora Core 3 with no problems. 
>The only issue I run into is lack of disk space!  Sometimes 50GB is not 
>enough!

Unfortunately, Jonathan didn't say what the process size he saw was so
this doesn't help much.

-- 
Peter Jeremy