memory leak in httpd or child process (what is a memory leak)

[paul sutton]

Thanks


This sounds familar


Paul

> On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, paul sutton wrote:
>
>> For the benefit of those who don't know what this is could someone 
>> please explain what a memory leak is.
>
>
> Hi Paul.  A memory leak is when a process consumes more memory than it 
> releases.  Since the process eventually goes on to claim additional 
> memory it can eventually start to consume so much that it impacts the 
> rest of the system.  How quickly this happens depends on how bad the 
> leak is and how demanding the process is.  The leak Teddy describes 
> seems fairly bad to me.
>
> Memory leaks are quite common in software.  Tools exist to assist in 
> locating them and ideally production quality applications would not 
> have such bugs.
>
> As Teddy notes, a work around is to periodically restart the 
> application to allow the kernel to free the memory for the rest of the 
> system but this is far from ideal in a production environment.
>
> In Linux you can impose a limitation on how much memory the process 
> can consume.  This will prevent a memory leak taking out the entire 
> system but it doesn't help the process itself which would eventually 
> crash.
>
> When you have a memory leak in the kernel itself the only solution is 
> a reboot fortunately such things are very rare.
>
> Rob
>

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