Wow. Just...wow.

**k0NG0** · 12-04-2007, 06:58 PM

Man alive, thrash city. I'd had OpenSUSE 10.2 running for 18 days and just fifteen minutes ago it became unusable. HDD going like a banshee and a system about as responsive as something very unresponsive (a teenager, for example).

Managed to get top running and whadda y'know. X is at >1000MB of virtual memory and 250MB RSS (resident set size, what's actually allocated in physical RAM). What a leaky piece of leakiness that is (as I can't imagine all that is fragmentation). After hard reset/reboot, X's RSS is 12, I repeat, 12MB. What the fudge?

It's the first time I've had thrashing this bad. I mean, the swap partition is 1GB or so, and RAM is 512MB: I was all topped out. Completely unusable it was! (Zoidberg moment.)

Anyway, no real point of this thread, just a bit of venting. I think I need to reboot once in a while. Seriously.

If anyone else has had a Linux box running for a longer period of time it'd be interesting to see what the memory usage for X is on your end.

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**k0NG0** · 12-04-2007, 07:24 PM

Wow, it's so much more responsive overall after a reboot. I actually didn't think it made this big a difference, but it clearly does.

One reboot a day keeps insanity away.

Programmers. Bunch of degenerate ne'er-do-wells the lot of them.

SRTDodge05 · 12-04-2007, 07:29 PM

Every 30days i restart my 2k3 server to refresh it and clear the memory. Its always good to restart now and then.

FightingChance · 12-04-2007, 09:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SRTDodge05

Every 30days i restart my 2k3 server to refresh it and clear the memory. Its always good to restart now and then.

Well, for Windows anyway. I thought one of the foremost features of the Linux kernel was the way it could release memory back to the system for near limitless uptime.

S.SubZero · 12-04-2007, 10:01 PM

Linux is perfect and absolutely incapable of flaw, thus it is obviously operator error.

(that's what the Linux-heads always say, right?)

**k0NG0** · 12-05-2007, 06:06 AM

Well, Linux is just the kernel. I'm pretty sure it's really good when it comes to up-times in the years (I had a headless Slackware server a couple years back running for 18 months without acting up, but it mostly ran cron/apache/ssh/ftp and certainly not X).

X run atop the kernel and apparently it's a tad leaky. At least the version in OpenSUSE 10.2. If the software doesn't return memory, the kernel can't just simply take it away.

It may have some to do with my usage pattern. I tend to kill Minefield (Fx3 nightly builds) at least once a day because it hangs or generally agitates me, and perhaps it has X memory allocated that then doesn't get freed (I'm not sure what's involved in forcefully killing a process, but I'm guessing memory allocated through interactions with other processes will leak, would make sense).

jaketerminate · 12-05-2007, 06:23 AM

Thats insulting :P

XJ. · 12-05-2007, 09:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by k0NG0

It may have some to do with my usage pattern. I tend to kill Minefield (Fx3 nightly builds) at least once a day because it hangs or generally agitates me, and perhaps it has X memory allocated that then doesn't get freed (I'm not sure what's involved in forcefully killing a process, but I'm guessing memory allocated through interactions with other processes will leak, would make sense).

That would be my guess - I take it that Minefield (the game?) has a GUI? But something else is wrong if killing it 18 times consumes ~1GB of VMem.

TQ · 12-05-2007, 09:53 AM

I had to do search on "Zoidberg Moment". I really need to watch more TV.

**k0NG0** · 12-05-2007, 11:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XJ.

That would be my guess - I take it that Minefield (the game?) has a GUI? But something else is wrong if killing it 18 times consumes ~1GB of VMem.

Minefield is the name Firefox 3 nightly builds go by. Since it may/will blow up.

Using lots of tabs it tends to eat quite a bit of memory (after 89 minutes it's at 292MiB RSS / 515MiB virtual). They're working hard on solving as much of the fragmentation problem, which plagues Firefox, as possible (a problem that artificially inflates memory usage numbers). But all graphics eventually touch X, which allocates memory. (Although X is quite reasonable at 59MiB RSS / 147MiB virtual right now.)

Don't think I've killed Minefield yet, though. We'll see what happens, I guess. I'll be keeping an eye on it. And reboot more often, for sure.

XJ. · 12-05-2007, 11:28 AM

Oh, I C now. Well, next time you kill FF3, take a look at X's mem stats and then look again after you start FF3 again and see if X grows.

Rebooting a Linux box - eh. I had SunOS up for 18 months, until a massive power outage shut it down (didn't have a ups on it) - and that was a box I used actively for embedded development. Never had Slowaris up for more than 6 months though...

**k0NG0** · 12-05-2007, 12:01 PM

Just had to kill it and X doesn't really inflate much at all (there may be special cases where it does, a sample of one is only as good as a sample of none).

I have no idea how it managed to gobble up over a full Gig of virtual memory in just 18 days. I'm really not doing anything wacky with it.

Fragmentation really hurts Firefox, though. What was almost 300MiB of RSS before the kill, was 68MiB after restart (using session restore). Even with forward/back caches and such in mind, it's still pretty nasty.

**k0NG0** · 12-18-2007, 07:57 PM

I now have an uptime of 12 days and X is at 87MiB RSS (198MiB virtual). I have absolutely no idea how it managed to get to over 1GiB of virtual memory in 18 days. Astounding.

Side note: Minefield nightly (Firefox 3.0b3pre 20071216) is at 233MiB RSS (409MiB virt) with 3 windows and 23 tabs total, some with small Flash content (Flash's memory use falls under Firefox, as do all plug-ins). Not too bad, I'd say. They're really pounding on the memory allocations for Firefox 3.0, a lot of fixes are already in (cutting # of allocations at start-up by 25%, roughly 100,000 less, and there's still work to do) and with the new allocator (BSD's jemalloc from what I've read) the fragmentation problems should be much improved. Meaning smaller memory footprint across the board. And there's more work besides that, too. Good times, very exciting stuff. Beta 2 is out before xmas, though nightlies serve me very well, a lot less crashy since the beta cycle started. Or, well, a lot less freeze-y, since it rarely crashes and when it does it's usually the vlc or mplayer plug-ins that cause it (cause they both kinda suck really bad).

XJ. · 12-18-2007, 10:06 PM

You must have cause the code to trip over a freak bug. You remember the complexity problem from some freshmen/sophomore programming course, right?

**k0NG0** · 12-19-2007, 02:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XJ.

You must have cause the code to trip over a freak bug. You remember the complexity problem from some freshmen/sophomore programming course, right?

Yeah. "Software is hard. Programmers suck. 1+1= -3"

12-04-2007, 06:58 PM	#1
k0NG0 Remembering TQ Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Sweden Posts: 13,749	Wow. Just...wow. Man alive, thrash city. I'd had OpenSUSE 10.2 running for 18 days and just fifteen minutes ago it became unusable. HDD going like a banshee and a system about as responsive as something very unresponsive (a teenager, for example). Managed to get top running and whadda y'know. X is at >1000MB of virtual memory and 250MB RSS (resident set size, what's actually allocated in physical RAM). What a leaky piece of leakiness that is (as I can't imagine all that is fragmentation). After hard reset/reboot, X's RSS is 12, I repeat, 12MB. What the fudge? It's the first time I've had thrashing this bad. I mean, the swap partition is 1GB or so, and RAM is 512MB: I was all topped out. Completely unusable it was! (Zoidberg moment.) Anyway, no real point of this thread, just a bit of venting. I think I need to reboot once in a while. Seriously. If anyone else has had a Linux box running for a longer period of time it'd be interesting to see what the memory usage for X is on your end. __________________ Use Firefox - "the one that blocks all the schmutz" Feeling multicore elation? Remember this correlation: Amdahl's Law.
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12-04-2007, 07:24 PM	#2
k0NG0 Remembering TQ Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Sweden Posts: 13,749	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Wow, it's so much more responsive overall after a reboot. I actually didn't think it made this big a difference, but it clearly does. One reboot a day keeps insanity away. Programmers. Bunch of degenerate ne'er-do-wells the lot of them. __________________ Use Firefox - "the one that blocks all the schmutz" Feeling multicore elation? Remember this correlation: Amdahl's Law.
(Offline)

12-04-2007, 07:29 PM	#3
SRTDodge05 Grab Life By The Balls Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Michigan Posts: 7,835	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Every 30days i restart my 2k3 server to refresh it and clear the memory. Its always good to restart now and then.
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12-04-2007, 10:01 PM	#5
S.SubZero Vista x64 User Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: California Posts: 1,277	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Linux is perfect and absolutely incapable of flaw, thus it is obviously operator error. (that's what the Linux-heads always say, right?) __________________ -SSZ
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12-05-2007, 06:06 AM	#6
k0NG0 Remembering TQ Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Sweden Posts: 13,749	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Well, Linux is just the kernel. I'm pretty sure it's really good when it comes to up-times in the years (I had a headless Slackware server a couple years back running for 18 months without acting up, but it mostly ran cron/apache/ssh/ftp and certainly not X). X run atop the kernel and apparently it's a tad leaky. At least the version in OpenSUSE 10.2. If the software doesn't return memory, the kernel can't just simply take it away. It may have some to do with my usage pattern. I tend to kill Minefield (Fx3 nightly builds) at least once a day because it hangs or generally agitates me, and perhaps it has X memory allocated that then doesn't get freed (I'm not sure what's involved in forcefully killing a process, but I'm guessing memory allocated through interactions with other processes will leak, would make sense). __________________ Use Firefox - "the one that blocks all the schmutz" Feeling multicore elation? Remember this correlation: Amdahl's Law.
(Offline)

12-05-2007, 06:23 AM	#7
jaketerminate Maximum Post Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Mordor Posts: 915	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Thats insulting :P __________________ "Mozart" Rig #1 Case: Thermaltake Mozart TX Mobo: Asus P5N-E CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz Memory: 4GB (2x 2GB) G.Skill DDR2 Hard Drive: 320 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM Video Card: EVGA Nvidia 9800GX2 1GB (512MB per GPU) Power Supply: 600W OCZ StealthXStream OS: Windows XP Homee Edition and Ubuntu Linux x64 Monitor: 22" Westinghouse LCD and 2 Dell CRTs HP G60t CPU: Intel Pentium 2.0ghz Memory: 4GB Hard Drive: 250GB 5400RPM GPU: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M OS: Windows 7 Ultimate Build 7000 Beta + Ubuntu Linux HP Pavillion tx 2000z Tablet CPU: AMD Turion x2 2.1Ghz Memory: 3GB Hard Drive: 250GB 5400RPM GPU: ATI Radeon 3200 64mb OS: Windows 7 Ultimate Build 7000 Beta 1TB Seagate External Backup Drive
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12-05-2007, 09:53 AM	#9
TQ You gonna throw that? Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 8,442	Re: Wow. Just...wow. I had to do search on "Zoidberg Moment". I really need to watch more TV. __________________ Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me - Psalm 51:10 My goal in life is to be as good of a person as my dogs already think I am... Daywalker Studio: Software: Adobe Audition 3.0/Pro Tools LE 7.4/Acid Pro 6.0/Multiple VST, DirectX and RTAS plugins/Kontakt 3 Sampler/Windows XP Professional PC Hardware: D975XBX2-504/E6600/4x2GB Mushkin XP2-6400/eVGA 800GTX/HP f1905 19" flat panel/Echo Audio Gina24 Sound Card/2 Maxtor 6B300SO's/1 Maxtor STM500AS/1 Western Digital WD2500JD/PleXwriter Premium/Plextor 716A/Samsung LightScribe DVD burner/Logitech Revolution MX/Antec P-180b/PPC&C Silencer 610/Zalman CNPS9500 HSF Recording Hardware: Mbox 2 Factory Pro/Mackie SR24.4VLZ Pro Console/M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI Controller/Audio-Technica 4033a microphone/Symetrix 528E/PreSonus Eureka/Mackie MR8 active monitors Game Machine: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6/E8400/4x2GB Mushkin XP2-8500/BFG GTX280/HP f2105 21" flat panel/Creative Labs X-Fi Elite Pro/Maxtor 6H500F0/Maxtor STM3320/Western Digital WD4000KD/Plextor 760A/Toshiba DVD-ROM/Zalman CNPS9700/Antec P-180/PPC&C Silencer 610/Ideazon Merc Stealth keyboard/Vista Business64 SP1
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12-05-2007, 11:28 AM	#11
XJ. Back at the Zone! Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: NH, USA Posts: 6,468	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Oh, I C now. Well, next time you kill FF3, take a look at X's mem stats and then look again after you start FF3 again and see if X grows. Rebooting a Linux box - eh. I had SunOS up for 18 months, until a massive power outage shut it down (didn't have a ups on it) - and that was a box I used actively for embedded development. Never had Slowaris up for more than 6 months though...
(Offline)

12-05-2007, 12:01 PM	#12
k0NG0 Remembering TQ Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Sweden Posts: 13,749	Re: Wow. Just...wow. Just had to kill it and X doesn't really inflate much at all (there may be special cases where it does, a sample of one is only as good as a sample of none). I have no idea how it managed to gobble up over a full Gig of virtual memory in just 18 days. I'm really not doing anything wacky with it. Fragmentation really hurts Firefox, though. What was almost 300MiB of RSS before the kill, was 68MiB after restart (using session restore). Even with forward/back caches and such in mind, it's still pretty nasty. __________________ Use Firefox - "the one that blocks all the schmutz" Feeling multicore elation? Remember this correlation: Amdahl's Law.
(Offline)

12-18-2007, 07:57 PM	#13
k0NG0 Remembering TQ Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Sweden Posts: 13,749	Re: Wow. Just...wow. I now have an uptime of 12 days and X is at 87MiB RSS (198MiB virtual). I have absolutely no idea how it managed to get to over 1GiB of virtual memory in 18 days. Astounding. Side note: Minefield nightly (Firefox 3.0b3pre 20071216) is at 233MiB RSS (409MiB virt) with 3 windows and 23 tabs total, some with small Flash content (Flash's memory use falls under Firefox, as do all plug-ins). Not too bad, I'd say. They're really pounding on the memory allocations for Firefox 3.0, a lot of fixes are already in (cutting # of allocations at start-up by 25%, roughly 100,000 less, and there's still work to do) and with the new allocator (BSD's jemalloc from what I've read) the fragmentation problems should be much improved. Meaning smaller memory footprint across the board. And there's more work besides that, too. Good times, very exciting stuff. Beta 2 is out before xmas, though nightlies serve me very well, a lot less crashy since the beta cycle started. Or, well, a lot less freeze-y, since it rarely crashes and when it does it's usually the vlc or mplayer plug-ins that cause it (cause they both kinda suck really bad). __________________ Use Firefox - "the one that blocks all the schmutz" Feeling multicore elation? Remember this correlation: Amdahl's Law.
(Offline)

12-18-2007, 10:06 PM	#14
XJ. Back at the Zone! Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: NH, USA Posts: 6,468	Re: Wow. Just...wow. You must have cause the code to trip over a freak bug. You remember the complexity problem from some freshmen/sophomore programming course, right?
(Offline)

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