[CentOS] out of memory

Thu Jul 31 21:59:18 UTC 2008
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 17:18 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 10:16 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> > <snip>
> 
> > but on July 27 - the day I updated - no users in office - same time
> > period, the kbswpfree starting swinging wildly.
> > 
> > But sar doesn't tell me which program is leaking memory but perhaps it
> > was just the update without reboot that was the issue.
> 
> Regardless of users in the office, if they left themselves logged in the
> old version of libs/programs would have to be kept on the system and in
> memory (or swap). If your users were like mine used to be, that's
> likely. Then as users began logging in/out the systems would have two
> versions of many libs/prgms active at the same time. Result is likely at
> least a doubling of mem/swap usage because of very little shared code.
----
nothing like a system death and cold reboot to make certain that all
users are logged out I guess ;-)

Yeah, I have some users who despite my occasional begging to get them to
shut down or at least log off, simply don't.

FWIW - according to sar, the kbswpfree has remained high all day so I
suspect that this is something that will bite me again a long time in
the future when I least expect it.

Thanks for the tip on sar...it's sort of cool and it's been taking
snapshots all along which does confirm the problem but of course didn't
identify the source of the problem.

Craig