Package: findutils
Version: 4.2.28-1
Severity: grave
updatedb during it's run consumes almost all of the system's available
memory (as reported by top), and fails to release it when the run is
complete. The memory consumption at the end of the run appears to be
about 1/3 kernel and 2/3 userspace for ALL of the memory in the
system, however adding up the memory used by the running processes
after the updatedb run completes does not come anywhere near the total
memory usage reported by top. This bug appears during findutils daily
run and at any time that updatedb is invoked independently.
I have managed to reproduce this behaviour, on demand, on two machines
(both running Debian/unstable). One is an AMD64 with 1GB of RAM, and
the other is an i386 with 512MB of RAM. Both machines show the same
relative memory consumption patters. It should be noted that nothing
is swapped out on either machine. Both machines are running kernel
2.6.17.
The severity is set to grave because this bug makes the entire system
unusable until it is rebooted.
James
