On Aug 13, 2018, at 16:27, Rob Landry <[email protected]> wrote:
> A station emailed me just now to report that rdairplay died in the middle of
> a piece of music.
>
> /var/log/messages shows that the OS ran out of memory and killed rdairplay.
>
> This is RD 2.16 running under CentOS 6 on older hardware with 1 GB RAM. The
> machine doesn't do anything but run Rivendell with no manual intervention.
> It's been running for at least a year with no problems.
>
> What would cause the OS to run out of memory, I wonder?
Any number of things. A buggy application or device driver, faulty hardware,
etc. When that happens, the kernel’s out of memory handler (aka the ‘OOM
killer’, in the syslog) will semi-randomly select a process to terminate so as
to free up more memory and avoid panicking the kernel. It’s important to note
that the process so killed is not necessarily the one that caused the problem!
Finding the true cause for these events can be difficult. What I typically do
is set up a cron job that periodically captures a list of all running processes
with their memory utilization. Then, it’s a matter of looking at that list to
find a long-running process whose memory consumption is trending steadily
upwards. The fact that this machine had been running for at least a year
without apparent problems tells me that either the memory leak is very slow
(which means that it could take a long time for the pattern of increasing
memory utilization to emerge from the noise), or that something has recently
gone wonky in the hardware (in which case it may manifest again very quickly).
In either case, it comes down to basic detective work: capturing data over
time, then looking for trends.
Cheers!
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer |
| | Paravel Systems |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| A room without books is like a body without a soul. |
| -- Cicero |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
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