Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2015 21:08:55 +0100 From: Frank Leonhardt <frank2@fjl.co.uk> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Swap exhaustion Message-ID: <5575F657.1040301@fjl.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <1CD13C1C-5344-4909-A061-F25FBB86AFF9@lafn.org> References: <1CD13C1C-5344-4909-A061-F25FBB86AFF9@lafn.org>
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On 28/05/2015 00:49, Doug Hardie wrote: > I have a process that is eating up 6 GB of swap space. At that point, FreeBSD 9.3 terminates a process. However, occasionally its not the one eating up the space. When I manually quit the process then the swap space returns to a few KB used. The system runs fine after that. > > I have very little knowledge of what this process is doing internally but would like to know what might be causing this issue. There are 5 of these processes running (parent plus 4 children). Normally each uses about 90 MB RES/SIZE. However when the problem occurs they are about 2GB RES/SIZE each. The system has 4 GB memory. I thought that a malloc would not be able to grab that much memory, even with swapping as it has to be in memory. Could a malloc cause this growth in process size or need I look elsewhere? > > > Been there and done that :-) While this doesn't directly answer you're question, I wrote some stuff up about it here: http://blog.frankleonhardt.com/2011/large-swap-files-on-freebsd-die-with-mystery-killed-howto-add-lots-of-swap-space/ It was a while ago,and I'm a bit hazy, but I remember debugged the issue by modifying the kernel files I mention in order to tell me what was going on. It's actually very easy to do. Regards, Frank.
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