RE: [Snort-devel] SNORT has memory leak on Linux Red hat 9

From: Kumar, Manoj <kumarm(at)netscout.com>
Date: Fri Feb 27 2004 - 11:21:09 EST

Guys,
Thanks for your reply. It seems to be a problem with Linux OS. We sent the same issue to Linux users mailing list and we got back the reply that "I regularly see people, on this
list and on others, misinterpret memory-usage reports to infer the presence of memory leaks where none exist. For example, if you are using "free" to check memory use, you should be using the second line of its output, not its first. And if you are using "top" ... don't; use "free" instead. As reported by "top" or the first line of "free", memory usage on any Linux system will always increase until almost 100% of real (not swap) memory is "in use" ... but that's just kernel buffering at work, not a real tying up of RAM, and does not indicate a system or application problem."

So,basically,it's a normal behaviour for Linux to consume all the physical memory.It has nothing to do with SNORT.

So,it seems our SNORT is behaving as it should :)

Manoj

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Macdonald [mailto:ism@iwasdot.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 6:06 PM To: Kumar, Manoj
Cc: Jeremy Hewlett; snort-users@lists.sourceforge.net; snort-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; snort-announce@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Snort-devel] SNORT has memory leak on Linux Red hat 9

The first thing that seems odd is that the memory doesn't free up after killing the process. Normally all memory would be released on application termination. When you say memory doesn't free what item are you looking at?
One thing you might want to do is try killing other applications to see if they are the ones that are stealing the memory. You may even want to remove the loaded modules one by one incase the memory leak is in the network driver module.
The only other thing of the top of my head is that machine is swapping so much that it takes time for the OS to swap out the memory from disk to allow it to be released?
Have you tried it on a different OS or Kernel?

> Hello everybody,

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https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/snort-devel Received on Fri Feb 27 11:55:23 2004