[mythtv-users] Re: Is this a memory leak?

[Michael J. Lynch]

It could be a driver bug *if* your talking about a few connections with
low message rates (sub 100 connections with message rates of < 5/sec).
This specifically references high message rates (> 80000/sec) and/or large
numbers of virtual connections (>10000).  Under these circumstances
with packet sizes being anywhere from 128 to 4k in size and being sent
over slow lines (generally 9600 baud and slower),  message buffering
can easily use up memory.

Besides, the same streams drivers on Solaris, QNX, and other OS's don't
have this problem.  It is specifically a problem on linux that is a
direct result of linux's kernel memory release policy.  The point is, that
people should be aware that this occurs on linux and could explain
strange problems with suddenly not being able to aquire memory.

Either way, this really isn't the place for this discussion and I'll no
longer post replies for this thread.


Simon Kenyon wrote:

>On Tuesday 11 January 2005 15:57, Michael J. Lynch wrote:
>  
>
>>Except from whitepaper:
>>
>>This poses a problem for anyone wanting to use Linux as a communications
>>server handling a large number of connections or queueing a large number
>>of messages.  The reason is that calling the kernel memory allocator
>>from a STREAMS driver will not cause disk buffers to be released to
>>satisfy the allocation request.  Thus, if memory is nearly full of disk
>>buffers and the like there is only a small amount of memory left for
>>control blocks and messages.
>>    
>>
>sounds like a bug in the driver to me
>--
>simon
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>  
>


-- 
Michael J. Lynch

What if the hokey pokey IS what it's all about -- author unknown