kernel leaking memory somewhere

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Wed Dec 16 18:40:06 PST 2009


:
:I just tried running the mem stress tool, and I managed to allocate
:maximum 2000MB. Any number higher than that just said "ok, done" but the
:memory according to top wasnt actually allocated. Is there some kind of a
:limit?

   A user process on a 32 bit system can allocate around 2GB of VM via mmap
   (which is what our malloc uses).  The entire user address space is
   only 3G.

   You can run several stress programs in parallel but be careful not to
   exceed your configured swap space (well, physical memory + swap) or
   you will force the kernel to start killing processes.  It will probably
   choose the memory stressors to kill but still, not a good idea on
   a production system.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>





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