Re: potential malloc problem with recent ATA commits ?

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:15:44 +0200
Pascal Hofstee <caelian_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Since i recently updated my CURRENT system from a March 26 build to a
> fresh CURRENT i noticed that after a while the system seems to run
> itself into a state wherein it is entirely out of memory.
> 
> The problem has presented itself so far during the last couple of days
> when i come back home from a day at college to find the console
> spewing tons of messages about (iirc) ata3/ata6 being unable to alloc
> memory, shell processes that were still running being unable to fork
> new processes because of memory shortage etc.

After some suggestions on ##FreeBSD on FreeNode i opted to checkout
"vmstat -m" statistics and i did notice one single entry that i felt i
should mention just in case it may be relevant.

The entry in question is the vmstat's "InUse" statistics regarding the
memorytype "devbuf". It's value seems to consistently increase itself
by about 140k over a period of 10 seconds (while the system is doing a
buildworld) and has at the time of writing reached a value of 75082k
and rising.

I do not know If this is alarming or not but i felt i should at least
mention it.

With kind regards,
  Pascal Hofstee