From: marchini@ds18.scri.fsu.edu (Juan Marchini) Subject: Re: Memory leak in kernel/net-2? Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 08:24:24 GMT
In article <CB22JC.FBn@mailer.cc.fsu.edu> dwyer@cs.fsu.edu (Frank Dwyer) writes:
>I've heard mention of a memory leak problem in recent Linux versions, but
>haven't seen any fixes for the problem. My current installation seems to be
>experiencing a bad memory leak, and I'd like to fix it. I'm also wondering
>how widespread this problem is.
>
>I'm using a 386/25 with 8M RAM, a WD ether card, .99pl11, Net-2, GCC 2.4.3,
>4.4.1 libs & includes.
>
>It takes about 10 minutes of heavy pounding to make this machine crash, and
>when memory runs low, I get lots of "No memory for IP forward" and "can't
>allocate an sk_buf of XXX bytes" messages. I've seen lots of questions
>about this error message on the net lately, and wonder if the problem might
>relate to this memory problem.
yes, well it seems that my friend, Frank, and i have found that the
memory leak can be attributed to having the pc on the internet:
we found, through using etherfind on a neiboring sun, that there's a
machine, on our net, that broadcasts arp packets to the whole cs
subnet. all the suns on the net discard it, seeing as none of them
are routers, but every time this happens, the pc seems to save the
information and ends up never getting rid of it. btw, this machine
arps something like 45 packets every 2-3 minutes or so.
so we seem to believe now, that it is due to the net code's inability
to discard these packets, i.e. no matter what we do, it seems to
always want to route things, but it never knows where to route them
to, since we never configured it to be a router.
we're going to try to work with it, but any help, email or post, would
be appreciated.
juan