I forgot to post a followup to this thread. ( I did post a followup to the same thread on the DirectoryStroage maillinglist ;-) I solved this problem by applying the aa1 patch to the 2.4.20 kernel. If any of you experience a similar problem ( kswapd hogging the resources and never letting it go, etc ) try the aa1 patch. I also tried gentoo patches, but they didn't fix the problem. The problem was: when your low memory is scarce, kswapd kicks in and hogs all the remaining resources. A simple packing attempt of more than 1G storage would reproduce this madness with a vanilla 2.4.20 kernel. Even when things get cool, kswapd wouldn't let go the resources it's hogging. The cached memory, for example, is there for you to see but none of your processes can't retrieve any of it. The faster your IO devices (I've got a hardware raid, for example), the worse this problem gets. Try the following patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.4/2.4.20aa1. bz2 My problems gone with this patch. Cheers, Wankyu Choi --------------------------------------------------------------- Wankyu Choi CEO/President NeoQuest Communications, Inc. http://www.zoper.net http://www.neoboard.net --------------------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: Oliver Bleutgen [mailto:myzope@gmx.net] Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 9:02 PM To: Wankyu Choi Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] ZEO hogging too much memory Wankyu Choi wrote:
I just stopped the ZEO server and found all that 2G memory it was using didn't free up at all.
I'm running ZEO 2.01b1
Leaking?
I'm not an expert at linux kernel internals, but AFAIK even if the server is leaking, the kernel should reclaim the space when the process is stopped. You wrote you use kernel 2.4.0, that's very brave I'd say. I know it's easier said than done, but you better first install an newer linux kernel before looking at the zope stuff. You get at least the promise of a saner out-of-memory behavior. Other things you can do are setting process limits, so that the ZEO/zope servers cannot bring down the whole machine. There's also a zope specific product from chrism, autolance (search zope.org) which makes zope monitoring and restarting itself, when some conditions (memory etc.) are met. HTH, oliver