Thanks Wayne, This just may explain the behavior. I noticed that when I deleted the files that were transferred the memory was freed back up. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it - I am not a Linux kernel guru so some of the low-level subtleties of the OS are lost on me =8^).
I am starting to think there may be a kernel bug (or, maybe more likely, a misconfiguration), though. If it is the disk cache that is eating up this memory it does not seem to be freeing up for other processes when needed. I will eventually get a kernel panic on the machine when RAM and swap have been totally consumed during the rsync transfer. If this is the case, I may be out of luck, as Red Hat has retired RH8 so there will be no bug fixes on it - and I can't get 800GB+ of RAM into the machine to keep it running past the transfers. Rebooting a busy production machine every hour or so (before the panic can happen) is just not practical (geesh, sounds like I am running Windows). The application we are running will not run with the newer versions of RH yet, so I may have to go to a Sun solution. Cheers Kelly -----Original Message----- From: Wayne Davison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 9:09 PM To: Garrett, Kelly Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: rsync 2.6.0 - suspected memory leak bug On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 02:45:47PM -0700, Garrett, Kelly wrote: > After every rsync transfer there is a large amount of memory that is > not freed up. Your report sounds like you're not talking about process size, but a free-memory report from something like "top". If so, Linux uses unused memory as disk cache, so the more disk I/O that happens, the less free memory you'll see on your system. This isn't a bad thing, though, as this disk-cache memory will get used for process memory as needed. Also keep in mind that once a process terminates, there's no way it can continue to hold memory (unless there's a bug in the kernel). If you meant something else, please explain what you're measuring. In my tests rsync's memory size stays steady throughout the transfer (once the file list has been built). Shared memory between the forked processes on the receiving side does slowly become unshared, but that happened in prior rsync versions too (and we've got an internal change in CVS that should make this better for the next release). ..wayne.. -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
