[ale] System losing memory

[JK]

timothy at meanor.net wrote:
> Try this: ps -eo pid,rss,vsize,args | sort -n -k 3,3
> 
> This outputs PID, resident set size (all non-swapped memory process is
> using), vsize (virtual memory size of process), and command-line & args of
> each process, sorted by vsize.
> 
> Do you have any oom_kill messages in any logs in /var/log/ ?  I can't
> remember if it actually says "oom_kill" in the message, or if it just says
> "killing process".
> 
> It's interesting that your system has swap completely utilized, yet almost
> all memory in use is pagecache.  I recall seeing this before on older Red
> Hat boxes, but I can't remember what causes this.

I saw a similar problem on Fedora machines in the (IIRC) Core 3 era or
so. The cause was a driver for a multi-port serial card (RocketPort, I
think) which was leaking kernel pages.  (Pages alloc'd by drivers
don't turn up in process memory maps, since they're not [usually]
associated with any proc's VM.)

-- JK

-- 
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be
dismissed without evidence." -- Christopher Hitchens