[erlang-questions] Hidden Memory Hog

[Cyryl Płotnicki-Chudyk]

Maybe you're generating lots of unique atoms , these are not GCed

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 2:22 AM, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED> wrote:
> It sounds like a port driver or NIF leaking memory within the Erlang VM's OS process.  I would suggest using instrument:memory_data/0 or instrument:store_memory_data/1 to make sure.
>
> On 07/31/2011 04:31 PM, James Aimonetti wrote:
>> List,
>>
>> I'm at my wits end (they're short, no doubt, but still). I have a VM
>> running with several OTP applications that we've written. We see, over
>> the course of the day, memory consumption go up until its taking ~30%
>> system memory and 300-500MB of swap. Iterating over all processes and
>> checking their total_heap_size, no single process was greater than ~1
>> MB, with ~300 processes runnning. Forcing garbage collection on all
>> processes released maybe 15MB of system memory.
>>
>> erlang:memory() lists total memory around 18-20MB; ets tables were all
>> minimal, no dets tables. No processes has a message_queue_len > 0. No
>> processes that we maintain use the process dictionary.
>>
>> I started a second VM, migrating our OTP apps to the second VM, one at a
>> time, hoping that stopping one would cause a release of lots of memory
>> on the first VM. No such luck; it released a couple more MBs but still a
>> large presence and no change in swap usage. I then stopped everything I
>> could until only stdlib and kernel were running on the first VM, but to
>> no avail.
>>
>> Each application has 1-3 long running gen_servers that listen on an AMQP
>> queue and spawn worker processes to handle messages. They carry almost
>> no state. Some of the handlers will read binary blobs, open a socket,
>> wait for a connection, then transmit the blobs, closing the socket and
>> dying afterwards (they timeout after 5 minutes if no connection is
>> attempted, and are in a supervision tree so I know there aren't a mass
>> of them lying around). The blobs are between 20KB and 2MB. The rest of
>> the workers are similarly ephemeral.
>>
>> What other options are there to find where memory has been allocated? We
>> use binaries almost exclusively for strings, don't construct large
>> lists. I've poured over the efficiency guide looking for ideas of where
>> we've gone astray but am coming up blank so far.
>>
>> The system is idle; the only processes should be (and are, as far as I
>> can tell) the gen_servers meant to run for a long time.
>>
>> Erlang R14B01 (erts-5.8.2) [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [rq:4]
>> [async-threads:8] [kernel-poll:true]
>>
>> Any ideas are welcome,
>>
>> James
>>
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-- 
cyryl