Ken,
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:44, Ken Schumacher <[email protected]> wrote:
Stephen,
On Dec 17, 2010, at 7:02 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 14:28, Ken Schumacher <[email protected]> wro=
te:
Greetings,
I have a repeatable problem on at least one of our SLF 4.4 system=
s. =A0It seems that running commands like 'yum --check-update' seem t=
o run into some sort of memory leak. =A0The yum output gets to the po=
int of saying "Reading repository metadata in from local files" and a=
top listing on a another window shows the memory use simply climbing=
. =A0The original window will not respond to a Ctrl-C.
1) various versions of Yum does not respond to Ctrl-C because doin=
g so
can cause the rpm package database to be left in a bad place.
That's inconvenient in my current situation, but I understand the t=
hinking behind it. =A0I can work around this by having a second windo=
w open allowing me to 'kill -15' the yum process once it gets into th=
is bad state.
2) Yum will use a lot of memory depending on how much is installed=
. Of
course a lot is subjective and needs to be quantified. [100 mb was=
a
lot on one system and nothing on another.]
I wait about 60 CPU seconds before killing the yum process. =A0Acco=
rding to 'top', at that point it is using 100% of one CPU and it has =
already allocated itself 2 GB of memory. =A0On this cluster head node=
, that is just a bit over 10% of the node's memory, but I am concerne=
d about letting it go on consuming memory for fear of interfering wit=
h other services on the node.
I have checked the version of the yum and yum.conf RPMs on this nod=
e and compared to other systems we maintain. =A0We have other systems=
running those same versions without this memory consumption problem.=
=A0I have run yum using the '-d 5' flag to get some verbose debug ou=
tput. =A0The last output before this memory consumption starts says:
Would need to know what is installed on the system
=A0 Reading repository metadata in from local files
=A0 Setting up Package Sacks
3) 4.4 is really old. 4.8 is standard now and 4.9 will be out of t=
he
door by summer (it will also probably be the last 4.x series like =
the
3.9 was the last of the 3 series.)
The node was originally installed with the LTS 4.4 release (Wilson)=
. =A0Until recently, we have been running daily yum updates against t=
he node, so all the necessary errata and security updates have been a=
pplied. =A0Being a cluster head node, we can't jump the node up to a =
5.x release without proper planning and scheduling of downtime, etc. =
=A0Our user base expects the release to remain stable, so such upgrad=
es are carefully considered.
Well I thought that applying all the updates would bring the system t=
o
4.8 but I realize that Scientific Linux does keep old releases alive.
What does 'rpm -Va --nofiles' tell you?
How do you get the repodata for the systems (local mirror or remote o=
ne)?
Can you try updating 1-2 packages directly? or does even yum list giv=
e
you a 2GB process?
--=20
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidanc=
e."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren
Have you done a
yum clean all
for each of your repositories?
What version of yum and rpm do you have?
-connie sieh
