Well, the strange thing is we never see such a behavior on 2.3.3 w/TCL 7.0, and we run 4 web server with the same code/application. That's why I can't think of any code related issue.
I did check the size of the cache array we use for Memoizing stuff, and it's not that big at the time server is eating the memory. We were able to re-create the problem in 20 Minutes just by clicking on various pages (including TCL pages) and after we stop clicking the memory was kept getting eaten like 2-3MB per seconds and then it stops for a while and the starts again (while no activity), until it gets down to 16MB, and then it uses the max swap file allowed until it dies.
Anyhow, would you recommend to upgrade to 3.4.2 or 3.5.1 w/ TCL 8.3.1 ?
Thanks Pete for your follow up,
Seena
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter M. Jansson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 9:18 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] ns_mutex is likely causing our AOL web server
to hung - Memory problem
On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 07:58 PM, Seena Kasmai wrote:
> Would some please be kind enough and assist me how to only upgrade my TCL
> to 8.3.1 from my AOLserver/3.3.1+ad13 w/TCL 8.3 ??
For versions of AOLserver prior to 3.5, the Tcl implementation was tightly
tied to the AOLserver, and the only way to change the version of Tcl was
to use a different AOLserver version. Given that you're using the
3.3.1+ad13 version of AOLserver, you're probably using OpenACS (or ACS
itself), and switching to AOLserver 3.5.2 is not possible.
> Another issue that might be related (or may be not), is that I have
> noticed, while the AOLServer is running, the memory keeps getting shrink
> and eventually system runs out of memory and web serve dies. Initially
> when AOLServer comes up, system has about 840MB memory. So far in about
> every 24-hour period, the memory becomes under 16MB and eventually server
> crashes (and memory gets back to 875MB). Here is a snap shot of TOP when
> server starts up:
Seena, this behavior is not caused by a memory leak. There is no leak
that serious in AOLserver. Plenty of folks have had 3.3.1 systems that
take fair amounts of traffic and don't consume 800 MB of memory in 24
hours. There is something in your application that is grabbing memory and
making it unavailable to the rest of the system. Even though Tcl uses
garbage collection, Tcl can't GC memory that's being referenced (such as
in a Memoize cache).
Can you put some logging around your memoization to try to see what the
size of the memoize cache is? Perhaps you could register a pre-auth trace
that captures the size of the memoize cache, and then register a trace
that computes the size again (after the request has run, because it's a
trace) and logs the difference? If you could get a handle on whether one
request is particularly demanding on memory.
Even if you were able to update your Tcl, I think that, given the
magnitude of your memory issue, you would not see a meaningful improvement.
Pete.
