Re: net/asterisk13: memory leak under 12-CURRENT?

On 09/26/2017 14:45, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Befor starting a PR I'd liek to ask for some advice to document a supposedly
> existent memory leak in net/asterisk13 and 12-CURRENT.
> 
> Background:
> 
> Running recent 12-CURRENT (FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #58 r323999: Tue Sep 26
> 06:18:27 CEST 2017 amd64) on a PCengine APU 2C4, equipted with 4GB of RAM and
> 4080 KB free after the most recent SeaBIOS has been started, I try to utilise a
> net/asterisk13 as PBX on that platform. Asterisk13 has been build via poudriere
> and is compiled with CLANG/LLVM, not GCC!
> 

I'm running asterisk on similar hardware and also building with clang, 
and have it going for months without any problems. I have disabled many 
modules in that build though. Problem could be caused by some ancillary 
library pulled in by some module.

> When FreeBSD (NanoBSD) has been started, depending on the recent revision of the
> OS/Kernel, top shows ~3680 - 3705 MBytes of free memory. Starting
> net/asterisk13 via "service asterisk onestart" indicates an overall usage of up
> to 100 MBytes of memory. After having now run the Asterisk 13.17.2 daemon for
> two days resulted in ~ 3100 MBytes of free memory, while the asterisk daemon
> was still running and doing nothing. But performing several restarts on a
> freshly started box gives the same result after ~ 10 restarts - and even after
> stopping asterisk and let the system run for a couple of days doesn't free the
> memory. I stopped after 15 restarts or so watching the loss of memory after
> each restart of asterisk, so i came to the conclusion that there must be a
> memory leak somewhere. now i try to provide more informations as needed for a
> PR.
> 
> Can someone help?

Not sure, restarting the daemon should free any leaked memory the daemon 
has. If a killed process leaves memory locked at the system level there 
should be some other cause.

Have you tried diagnosing this memory with more tools?


Depending on how deep you want to investigate ps, top and vmstat are 
simple to use and give you some indication. To go deeper you'll need to 
use more complicated tools. Others are better suited than me for 
suggesting those. DTrace could be a powerful but not easy to use instrument.

Looking just at free memory (which under a UNIX OS can have various 
valid definitions, depending on how you account for inactive memory, 
buffers and laundry RAM) is definitely not enough. Have you seen 
asterisk process allocate more and more memory?

You should check also what other processes in the system are doing. A 
computer software when running never really does "nothing"(except, 
maybe, when swapped out) and some memory usage can accumulate in many 
parts of the system.

-- 
Guido Falsi <madpilot_at_FreeBSD.org>