From: "Luke A. Kanies" <luke@...>
Date: 2003-11-08T06:44:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Long-running daemon acquiring giant memory footprint

On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, Jason DiCioccio wrote:

> I have written a long-running daemon in ruby to handle dynamic DNS updates.
> I have just recently moved it from ruby 1.6 to ruby 1.8 and updated all of
> its libraries to their latest versions (it uses dbi and dbd-postgres).  The
> problem i am having now is that it appears to start out using a sane amount
> of memory (around 8mb) but then by the next day around the same time will
> be using close to 200MB for the ruby interpreter alone.  The daemon code
> itself is 100% ruby so I don't understand how this leak is happening.  Are
> there any dangerous code segments I should look for that could make it do
> this?  The only thing I could think of is the fact that every returned
> object from a sql query is .dup'd since ruby dbi passes a reference.
> However, these should be getting swept up automatically by the garbage
> collector.  This is driving me nuts and I would love it if someone could
> point me in the right direction..

The last time this happened to me it was because I had a member of a hash
referring to the parent.  I would assume that that would reliably cause
memory holes in just about any language.  I would double check your code,
see if you can find anything.  I resolved the problem by chopping the code
up until I found the growing part.

Good luck!

Luke

-- 
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Phil Greenspun