On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 03:01:15PM +0800, P.V.Anthony wrote: > > With kernel 2.6.14 it works fine. > > Starting from 2.6.15 upto 2.6.15-r7, it will hang after a few days. > I have noticed a similar problem that appears to be a kind of memory leak. I had upgraded both my desktop (amd64) and laptop (x86) from 2.6.14 to 2.6.15 a few weeks ago. After the upgrade, I started noticing that first thing in the morning or after long periods of the system being idle, the memory usage would climb to around 550MB. This seemed odd, as my normal memory usage is around 120MB (using conky as my system monitor).
I tried to identify what process was consuming all that ram, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. As I started wokring on the machine, the memory usage would slowly go down over the course of a few hours, and level off around 200MB (which is still more than normal). I have noticed this behavior on both my AMD64 box and my x86 laptop, using 2.6.15 from both ck-sources and gentoo-sources. I did read the release notes in gentoo-sources and over the life of 2.6.15 there have been a couple memory leak fixes introduced (one for the mouse dev and one for SCSI). Neither of these fixes seemed to make a difference (I first noticed the issue with 2.6.15-r1, then 2.6.15-r5 and still in 2.6.15-r7). Some of the steps I took to identify the root cause were to close all applications, shutdown X, stop all non essitinal services and checking the memory usage after each change. I did see small drops in memory, but even with everything shutdown, the system would still be consuming 350MB+ of ram. And again, after starting everything back up, I would still see 375MB+ or ram usage, but as I used the system it would tail off to around 200MB. I'm not sure this is a true memory leak, as most of the memory is reclaimed after a period of system usage. Most memory leaks I have run across just consume ram until there is nothing left and the system hangs, which sounds similar to what you are seeing. You did not specify what types of errors, dmesg output or anything else about your crash, so it could likely be something completely different. I was planning on posting about my expirence with 2.6.15 anyways, and your issue at a very high level sounded like it might be related. Maybe you could check your ram usage after the system has been up (and possibly idle) for a long time (I have seen the memory climb after about 8 hours or so of being idle). This weekend I went back to 2.6.14 on both systems, and I have not seen the strange memory usage issue yet. I am not sure how to go about isolating this issue any further to be able to file a proper bug report. I don't think I have enough information at this time, and I can't seem to find any method of identifying what is using the large chunks of ram when idle, and then freeing as the system is used. Regards, Brett -- [email protected] mailing list
