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From: "Brian T. Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org>
To: cfs-users@research.att.com
Subject: cfs and memory usage . . .
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 04:12:48 -0500
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I use the FreeBSD "port" of cfs, and I have noticed that it is very 
greedy in using memory.

Now, I'm a little unfriendly to it now in that I have a number of cfs 
file systems set up but even when I only had one or two it would behave 
the same way:

Memory usage is fine for "normal" activities, but if I do something that 
scans lots of files, such as running a "find" command that greps over 
the files in the CFS area or something, memory usage will shoot up to 
astronomical levels (eg, over 300M or more).

And that memory will never be freed.

This will so exhaust memory that the system will frequently crash not 
long afterwards.

Now, it looks like cfs is *meant* to respond to a SIGALRM and clean up 
memory that's no longer needed, and additionally to go through this 
cleanup automatically every 60 seconds:

	signal(SIGALRM,grimreap);
	alarm(60); /* every 60 secs */

(at the end of main).

But it looks like something is preventing this from happening, or the 
grimreap routine just never agrees to clean up anything.

I know that there are parameters I can tune to use less total memory but 
I'm wondering if other people have seen this behavior and what, if 
anything you did to deal with it.

Thanks for any hints that anybody can offer.


-- 
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts@babbleon.org (personal)

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