- Debian Squeeze, kernel 2.6.32-5-amd64, used in SOHO like environment - huge amount of committed memory, e.g. from /proc/meminfo Committed_AS: 369822496 kB see Appendix 1 below; - huge amounts of memory allocated by many processes, e.g. firefox-bin @ 120GB, see Appendix 2 below - confirmed by huge [anon] lines in pmap, eg. 00007fac3a1f7000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] see Appendix 3 below - problem pretty widespread amongst the main open graphical applications (evince, gvfs-fuse-daemon, gnome-keyring...)
It's the machine I'm writing from, and everything seems to work unless I change the VM parameter overcommit_memory to 2, which causes any new process to fail its mallocs due to excessive overcommit. It seems a "base" system library problem, but I'm not so sure... Thank you for the kind attention -- Enrico Bertocchi Appendix 1: /proc/meminfo """ MemTotal: 8197856 kB MemFree: 968536 kB Buffers: 85280 kB Cached: 6333036 kB SwapCached: 6064 kB Active: 5573300 kB Inactive: 1475164 kB Active(anon): 397408 kB Inactive(anon): 242152 kB Active(file): 5175892 kB Inactive(file): 1233012 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 7815612 kB SwapFree: 7794940 kB Dirty: 32 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 626572 kB Mapped: 89428 kB Shmem: 9380 kB Slab: 91504 kB SReclaimable: 73528 kB SUnreclaim: 17976 kB KernelStack: 2352 kB PageTables: 19736 kB NFS_Unstable: 20 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 11914540 kB Committed_AS: 369824888 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 326092 kB VmallocChunk: 34359409148 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 4222400 kB DirectMap2M: 4165632 kB """ Appendix 2: top output """ top - 21:20:37 up 6 days, 23:51, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 184 total, 1 running, 183 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 2.5%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 8197856k total, 7224432k used, 973424k free, 85276k buffers Swap: 7815612k total, 20672k used, 7794940k free, 6332820k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 13061 ebertocc 20 0 120g 229m 35m S 5 2.9 24:27.88 firefox-bin 12865 ebertocc 20 0 32.0g 2312 1668 S 0 0.0 0:06.27 gvfs-fuse-daemo 12748 ebertocc 20 0 24.0g 9528 2064 S 0 0.1 0:00.28 gnome-keyring-d 19046 ebertocc 20 0 16.4g 72m 15m S 0 0.9 0:08.25 evince 18644 ebertocc 20 0 16.3g 48m 12m S 0 0.6 0:05.39 evince 18312 ebertocc 20 0 16.3g 85m 13m S 0 1.1 0:11.36 evince 14320 ebertocc 30 10 16.1g 2440 2032 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 hw_server 12890 ebertocc 20 0 8804m 54m 23m S 0 0.7 3:09.11 nautilus 19294 ebertocc 20 0 8582m 28m 15m S 0 0.4 0:00.90 gedit 12917 ebertocc 20 0 8528m 11m 7452 S 0 0.1 0:00.10 mixer_applet2 12920 ebertocc 20 0 8470m 6112 4280 S 0 0.1 0:00.15 e-calendar-fact 13703 ebertocc 20 0 8398m 13m 8240 S 0 0.2 0:23.47 gnome-terminal 19554 ebertocc 20 0 8389m 11m 1276 S 0 0.1 0:00.00 xchat 19170 ebertocc 20 0 8383m 22m 12m S 1 0.3 0:49.65 xchat 12892 ebertocc 20 0 8364m 3048 2188 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 bonobo-activati 12772 ebertocc 20 0 8330m 5868 4304 S 0 0.1 0:00.37 x-session-manag 12734 root 20 0 8316m 3428 2448 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 gdm-session-wor 12884 ebertocc 20 0 8310m 3372 2624 S 0 0.0 0:00.22 gvfs-gdu-volume 12679 root 20 0 8273m 2776 2388 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 gdm-simple-slav 12888 ebertocc 20 0 8251m 1900 1460 S 0 0.0 0:01.40 gvfs-afc-volume 12673 root 20 0 8250m 2152 1960 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 gdm3 12882 ebertocc 20 0 359m 23m 12m S 0 0.3 1:30.92 gnome-panel 12906 ebertocc 20 0 286m 23m 8736 S 0 0.3 0:00.33 python 12900 ebertocc 20 0 267m 8100 5588 S 0 0.1 0:00.22 nm-applet 12905 ebertocc 20 0 249m 8232 6064 S 0 0.1 0:00.06 evolution-alarm """ Appendix 3 """ 13061: /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin 0000000000400000 76K r-x-- /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/xulrunner-stub 0000000000613000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/xulrunner-stub 0000000000614000 4K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fac3a1f6000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fac3a1f7000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fae3a1f7000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fae3a1f8000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fb03a1f8000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fb03a1f9000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fb23a1f9000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fb23a1fa000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fb43a1fa000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fb43a1fb000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fb63a1fb000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fb63a1fc000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fb83a1fc000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fb83a1fd000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fba3a1fd000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fba3a1fe000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fbc3a1fe000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fbc3a1ff000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fbe3a1ff000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fbe3a200000 8389632K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc03a3f2000 8K r-x-- /usr/lib/libXss.so.1.0.0 00007fc03a3f4000 2048K ----- /usr/lib/libXss.so.1.0.0 00007fc03a5f4000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/libXss.so.1.0.0 00007fc03a5f5000 44K r-x-- /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/components/libnkgnomevfs.so 00007fc03a600000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/components/libnkgnomevfs.so 00007fc03a7ff000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/components/libnkgnomevfs.so 00007fc03a800000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc03a9fd000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fc03a9fe000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc23a9fe000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fc23a9ff000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc43a9ff000 4K ----- [ anon ] 00007fc43aa00000 8391680K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc815c00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc815e00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc816200000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc816600000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc816a00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc816c00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817200000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817600000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817800000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817a00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817bfd000 12K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hangul-fc.so 00007fc817c00000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hangul-fc.so 00007fc817dff000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hangul-fc.so 00007fc817e00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc817ff3000 12K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hebrew-fc.so 00007fc817ff6000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hebrew-fc.so 00007fc8181f5000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-hebrew-fc.so 00007fc8181f6000 28K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-fc.so 00007fc8181fd000 2048K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-fc.so 00007fc8183fd000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-fc.so 00007fc8183fe000 8K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-lang.so 00007fc818400000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-lang.so 00007fc8185ff000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-indic-lang.so 00007fc818600000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc818800000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc818afd000 12K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-fc.so 00007fc818b00000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-fc.so 00007fc818cff000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-fc.so 00007fc818d00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc818f00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc819100000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc819300000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc819500000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc8196ff000 4K r-x-- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-lang.so 00007fc819700000 2044K ----- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-lang.so 00007fc8198ff000 4K rw--- /usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-arabic-lang.so 00007fc819900000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fc819b00000 1024K rw--- [ anon ] [... many omitted ...] 00007fce4c72b000 4K rw--- /lib/ld-2.11.2.so 00007fce4c72c000 4K rw--- [ anon ] 00007fff87a47000 232K rw--- [ stack ] 00007fff87b2c000 4K r-x-- [ anon ] ffffffffff600000 4K r-x-- [ anon ] total 134942848K """
