[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #3317: mythbackend memory leak

[Kevin Kuphal]

Carl Fongheiser wrote:
> On 5/7/07, *Kevin Kuphal* <kuphal at dls.net <mailto:kuphal at dls.net>> wrote:
>
>     I didn't find anything generic about a fork error with memory
>     allocation.  Is there additional information I can provide to diagnose
>     this?  My top shows:
>
>     top - 08:56:07 up 6 days, 42 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.10,
>     0.13, 0.09
>     Tasks:  97 total,   3 running,  94 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>     Cpu(s):  1.0%us,  3.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.4%id,  4.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.7%si,
>     0.0%st
>     Mem:    775856k total,   767484k used,     8372k free,      108k
>     buffers
>     Swap:   524280k total,   240864k used,   283416k free,   175920k
>     cached
>
>     with the backend process
>
>     31439 root      18   0  987m 499m  12m S  3.3 65.9  45:08.63
>     mythbackend
>
>
> Your machine is seriously short on swap space.  A good rule of thumb 
> is to allocate about 2x the amount of physical RAM for swap space.  As 
> to why you're getting a fork() error, fork() will attempt to clone the 
> entire address space.  In this case, that's 987MB worth.  Not all of 
> that will need to be backed by swap, but most of it will.  Since 
> you've only got 280 MB free, the fork() fails.
Thanks.  That does explain why it starts happening when it does but 
doesn't help the root of the problem.  Even with extra swap space, the 
problem will still occur, only after a longer period of time

Kevin