A customer has recently experienced a possible memory leak in its NDB-API application. What he did was something like:
# ps aux | grep <pid>
over time and then he saw the RSS increasing. When he would have had a look a little longer he would have seen that the RSS consumption would increase up to a certain level and then becomes stable. Which is the expected behavior.
But how to explain to the customer that his application, which
was in fact not doing anything, consumes more RSS?
With a diff over time on /proc/<pid>/smaps we found that
this area was the reason:
b67b7000-b6fca000 rw-p b67b7000 00:00 0 (8 Mbyte) Size: 8268 kB Rss: 148 kB Shared_Clean: 0 kB Shared_Dirty: 0 kB Private_Clean: 0 kB Private_Dirty: 148 kB Referenced: 148 kB
But what is this meaning? To find the answer we did a strace on the program and got the …
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