Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?
- by Izzy
On a fresh started system, free reports about 1.5G used RAM (8G RAM alltogether, Ubuntu 12.04 with lightdm and plasma desktop, one konsole window started). Having the apps running I use, it still consumes not more than 2G. However, having the system running for a couple of days, more and more of my free RAM disappears -- without showing up in the list of used apps: while smem --pie=name reports less than 20% used (and 80% being available), everything else says differently. free -m for example reports on about day 7:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7459 7013 446 0 178 997
-/+ buffers/cache: 5836 1623
Swap: 9536 296 9240
(so you can see, it's not the buffers or the cache). Today this finally ended with the system crashing completely: the windows manager being gone, apps "hanging in the air" (frameless) -- and a popup notifying me about "too many open files". Syslog reports:
kernel: [856738.020829] VFS: file-max limit 752838 reached
So I closed those applications I was able to close, and killed X using Ctrl-Alt-backspace. X tried to come up again after that with failsafeX, but was unable to do so as it could no longer detect its configuration. So I switched to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F2, captured all information I could think of (vmstat, free, smem, proc/meminfo, lsof, ps aux), and finally rebooted. X again came up with failsafeX; this time I told it to "recover from my backed-up configuration", then switched to a console and successfully used startx to bring up the graphical environment.
I have no real clue to what is causing this issue -- though it must have to do either with X itself, or with some user processes running on X -- as after killing X, free -m output looked like this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7459 2677 4781 0 62 419
-/+ buffers/cache: 2195 5263
Swap: 9536 59 9477
(~3.5GB being freed) -- to compare with the output after a fresh start:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7459 1483 5975 0 63 730
-/+ buffers/cache: 689 6769
Swap: 9536 0 9536
Two more helpful outputs are provided by memstat -u. Shortly before the crash:
User Count Swap USS PSS RSS
mail 1 0 200 207 616
whoopsie 1 764 740 817 2300
colord 1 3200 836 894 2156
root 62 70404 352996 382260 569920
izzy 80 177508 1465416 1519266 1851840
After having X killed:
User Count Swap USS PSS RSS
mail 1 0 184 188 356
izzy 1 1400 708 739 1080
whoopsie 1 848 668 826 1772
colord 1 3204 804 888 1728
root 62 54876 131708 149950 267860
And after a restart, back in X:
User Count Swap USS PSS RSS
mail 1 0 212 217 628
whoopsie 1 0 1536 1880 5096
colord 1 0 3740 4217 7936
root 54 0 148668 180911 345132
izzy 47 0 370928 437562 915056
Edit: Just added two graphs from my monitoring system. Interesting to see: everytime when there's a "jump" in memory consumption, CPU peaks as well. Just found this right now -- and it reminds me of another indicator pointing to X itself: Often when returning to my machine and unlocking the screen, I found something doing heavvy work on my CPU. Checking with top, it always turned out to be /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none.
So after this long explanation, finally my questions:
What could be the possible causes?
How can I better identify involved processes/applications?
What steps could be taken to avoid this behaviour -- short from rebooting the machine all X days?
I was running 8.04 (Hardy) for about 5 years on my old machine, never having experienced the like (always more than 100 days uptime, before rebooting for e.g. kernel updates). This now is a complete new machine with a fresh install of 8.04. In case it matters, some specs:
AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, using the open-source ati/radeon driver (so no fglrx installed), 8GB RAM, WDC WD1002FAEX-0 hdd (1TB), Asus F1A75-V Evo mainboard. Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with KDE4/Plasma. Apps usually open more or less permanently include Evolution, Firefox, konsole (with Midnight Commander running inside, about 4 tabs), and LibreOffice -- plus occasionally Calibre, Gimp and Moneyplex (banking software I'm already using for almost 20 years now, in a version which did fine on Hardy).
