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

[Carl Fongheiser]

On 5/7/07, Kevin Kuphal <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.

Carl Fongheiser
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