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Date:      Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:14:25 -0400
From:      Aleksandr Miroslav <alexmiroslav@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: BSD equivalent of Linux's free(1)?
Message-ID:  <AANLkTinY-pBzBbmg%2Bv5XQsRbhaBsJq9qxfXh9uPmhQPE@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100818184148.31442aa9@gumby.homeunix.com>
References:  <AANLkTikpOE%2BK6iWn38VKT_YiGY119JL5CcBVguMYq9q_@mail.gmail.com> <20100818184148.31442aa9@gumby.homeunix.com>

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On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 1:41 PM, RW <rwmaillists@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Is there any particular reason you want to know? Free memory isn't a
> very meaningful concept in FreeBSD.

I have a webserver that had it's Apache killed this morning. The box
itself had been stable for several years, as well as the Apache
instance. The error that I saw in /var/log/messages was something along
the following:

    "pid 1234 (httpd), uid 100, was killed: out of swap space"

So I went to check what was eating up the swap,

The problem itself was tracked down fairly easily, someone had added a
shelt script to cron (/home/user/foo.sh) and had mistakenly put the full
path to the script into the script itself -- essentially creating a
forkbomb.

But while I was in the middle of debugging this and noticed that line
from the logfile, I spent more time than necessary trying to figure out
exactly how much swap/memory was being used, and who was using it.



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