[SUMMARY] Memory leak (again)

Thank you for all the responses.  I did not definitively find a culprit 
but my guess would have been Samba.  Since this is 2.6 I did not have 
prstat to run but I did do some of the other suggestions.  Some are 
listed here.  They have some good commands for your toolbox aliases.

## From Jay Lessert ##
 > You've eliminated /tmp files, so if you run:
 > /bin/ps -A -o user,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,s,stime,time,args
 > (that's an alias for me), you should find some processes showing big
 > total size (VSZ). You can even run the output through 'sort -nr -k 5,5'
 > (if I counted right).
 > Technically, "memory leak" means an application is malloc'ing memory
 > and then not releasing it (or re-using it), and so growing without
 > bound for no good reason.
 > You might not have a memory leak at all, of course. You may just have
 > an app that wants a ton of memory.

## Rich Kulawiec ##
 > I'm puzzled; what evidence do you have that a memory leak is actually 
occuring?
At the time I had about 2000 processes running.  As the number of them 
decreased I would not recover anything.  A "swap -l" output showed I had 
no free swap for my two system swap areas.  As we manually added swap, 
it would get chewed up even though the number of processes was 
decreasing.  Today, after the reboot last night,  I currently have 1100 
processes running and a swap -l output shows I have all my swap available.

SUPERUSER@centaur:/tmp> swap -l
swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/md/dsk/d3      85,3      16 2097344 2097344
/dev/md/dsk/d15     85,15     16 4194272 4194272

The only third party apps on this box are Samba and Oracle forms 
(runform3).  My guess is Samba.  I ran
"find /proc/*/fd -type f -ls|sort -k 7,7n"
(The above command was mentioned by Trey Valenta. Thanks Trey)
This produced a couple of files that were over a gig in size.  I killed 
the processes (Samba) and recovered some memory.

## Kevin Buterbaugh ##
 > I'd start with the 3rd party apps like Samba that you have installed
 > and run truss on them. I bet you'll find one of them malloc'ing memory
 > but not freeing it. It's a time consuming, laborious process, but I think
 > it may be your best bet. HTH...
WHEW!!!  I think I will take the path of least resistence here and just 
reboot the box.  Thanks Kevin and BTW, cool tagline!
"Solaris for servers, Linux for developers, MacOS for creative 
professionals, Windows for Solitaire."

Thanks also to; Terry Gardner, Mike Kail, and Paul Roetman

-- Original Question --

I have searched through the archives and found a lot of questions asking
about how to find memory leaks but no SUMMARYs were posted. So, I have
to ask.

System is a E450, 2.6, 2GB

Output of swap -l
SUPERUSER@centaur:/> swap -l
swap file       dev   swaplo blocks  free
/dev/md/dsk/d3  85,3  16     2097344 133888
/dev/md/dsk/d15 85,15 16     4194272 258448
/swap_tmp       -     16     204784  432
/swap_tmp2      -     16     204784  720

VMSTAT shows not a lot of paging.
There are no big files in /tmp.
lsof /tmp shows no big memory hogs.
This is mainly a Samba and telnet server.

We had to add the two extra swap spaces today to keep it going.
I have three other identical boxes that are fine.
Could someone point me to some other things to try? I could just reboot
but it would inconvenience a lot of users and some are running
production apps. I have scheduled a reboot for tonight but I would like
to know the culprit.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rick von Richter   IS Production Support Manager     Voice: 858-831-2222
rickv@mwh.com      Maintenance Warehouse/Home Depot    Fax: 858-831-2221
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The box says: Win98, WinNT or BETTER. That's why I installed Linux.
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